Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #367 - New Documents Prove Fauci Lied To Congress, Committing Perjury w/Zaid Jilani

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia join researcher and prolific journalist (formerly of The Intercept) Zaid Jilani to examine the case of the breaking news out of The Intercept functionally proving that Anthony Fauci lied under oath, just like Rand Paul said, Rachel Maddow's choice to leave up a thoroughly-debunked article about a hospital in Oklahoma being overrun by victims of ivermectin overdoses, how leftist dialogues have driven minorities away from being vaccinated in New York City, the red pill/blue pill conundrum as presented by binary thinkers in the media, the coming reckoning for the GOP in the 2022 midterms, and the AOC phenomenon of fundraising outside her own district by being an 'influencer politician'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New reporting by The Intercept shows that Anthony Fauci lied. And I think we knew that because there was a study that came out in 2017. Dr. Rand Paul actually held, I think he quoted it when he was questioning Fauci. And in this scientific study, they say they received funding from the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, and that in this study, they actually made chimeric viruses, which is basically gain of function. But Dr. Fauci pushed back saying, up that in this study, they actually made chimeric viruses, which is basically gain-of-function. But Dr. Fauci pushed back, saying, up and down the chain, it was determined this was not gain-of-function research. Well, as much as most people believe that he, well, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of people believe that he was lying, we now have this report from

The Intercept, which also published 900 pages. And we now have a professor from Rutgers saying, outright, this shows they were doing what is defined by the federal government as gain of function research there. There's the grant application. There's the progress reports. This was gain of function research. And Dr. Anthony Fauci lied, or I should say to quote the professor, he was being untruthful. Well, I'll be a little bit more bold than that. Now Rand Paul is saying, see, told you he lied. He lied again. Now Rand Paul has called for criminal, told you he lied. He lied again. Now Rand Paul has called for criminal action in the past.

I really don't think anything is going to happen. So we'll talk about this. We've got a bunch of other news. I've talked about a lot of this stuff earlier today, but we're going to break it all down, get into the conversation around it. We have that Rachel Maddow story. You may have seen Rachel Maddow tweeted fake news about ivermectin and Oklahoma hospitals being overrun. Didn't happen.

But apparently she's still pushing the story, I guess, and people are criticizing her. Fake news about ivermectin and Oklahoma hospitals being overrun didn't happen. But apparently she's still pushing the story, I guess, and people are criticizing her. So we'll get into all that as well as potentially some Afghanistan stuff. And we are being joined by journalist Zed Jelani. How's it going, man? It's great. It's good to be here. Do you want to just give a quick introduction to who you are? Yeah, so I am a – right now I'm a freelance journalist. I keep a sub-staff with my friend Sean Miserobian at inquiremore.com.

But I've spent probably a dozen years in journalism. I was a staff reporter at The Intercept. I was a reporter for Alternet. I was a reporter back at ThinkProgress back when it still existed at Center for American Progress. And I contribute to a range of publications, The Washington Examiner, Tablet Magazine. Basically, if you read it, I've probably written something at some point there. I've written in The Atlantic recently. Did a mini documentary for Fox News over the summer.

So, yeah, in a way I'm prolific, I guess, but I just kind of, you know, I want to go out there and explain the world. I want to figure things out together. Right on. That's interesting that you worked for ThinkProgress, Alternate, The Intercept, all particularly left or establishment publications. And then you're like, I also did something for Fox News over the summer. You know, I think back in the day you could and it wasn't really that big of a deal.

But in this past decade, it's been getting worse and worse to where it's like you're on one side or the other. But I do think it's interesting that you having worked at those places, I'm sure many of our viewers are not fans of, but Glenn Greenwald is, you know, citing you on Twitter saying you're a journalist, Rachel Maddow's a crackpot. And I think, you know, that speaks, that says a lot. So it'll be interesting to talk about this report from the Intercept and the history of these organizations, I think, or at least the recent history. And we'll get into like this shift in culture. You know, we have another story from the ACLU. The ACLU, what, only a couple of years ago, was it? They were saying vaccine passports are bad and wrong. We can't do it.

Yeah, they had put out a report, I think it was in 2008 or 2009, basically saying that in pandemics, government shouldn't be violating civil liberties, right? They need to focus on education, on public health. They don't need to focus on criminalization or, you know, measures that we would, at that time anyway, consider authoritarian. But yeah, they've done a total about face basically in the past year where they've embraced both mask mandates in schools and also vaccine mandates in other contexts. One of the articles that I think Glenn posted is from

2020, where they were like, passports are not the answer. Now they have an op-ed in the New York Times saying, yes, passports are good and not a violation of your civil liberties. These organizations have lost the plot. But I really want to talk about a lot of that stuff. And we'll start with the news. We also got Ian Hanger. Oh, yeah. Ian Crossland.

What's up, everybody? Happy to be here. Good to see you, too, after the long weekend. That's right. Long weekend. We got Lydia hanging out. Yeah, I'm also in the corner. Very excited to be here as well.

I'm excited to talk about the polarization and how all this has shifted strangely to the left. And I would say that we could probably just follow all the money to see what's really going on. And before we get started, head over to TimCast.com. Become a member. Support our fierce and independent journalism. We got a bunch of great reporters. We're hiring more by the day. Well, that's not true. We're hiring as many as we can as fast as we can, but it's not easy to vet people and make sure that they're going to do good work. But we are actually in the process of formalizing our nonprofit as well, which is going to do fact-checking for us and many other organizations, and we're also going to issue ratings. It's a big thing, but generally, if you're a member, you will support our journalism.

You'll get access to members-only segments, but we're also going to be launching a fact-checking outlet that's going to provide ratings to other news outlets based on a random sampling of recent articles they publish and whether or not they violate any journalistic ethics. And then you'll get a score of like X out of a hundred articles were considered ethical by SPJ standards. And then we'll break down our reasoning link to the stories. It's going to be fantastic with your support. We can do more stuff like that. So like this video, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends. Let's talk about this first big story, because this is really, really fascinating. We've got from TimCast.com.

Over 900 pages of coronavirus research info at Chinese Lab released. Following a FOIA lawsuit, documents regarding the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology are now public. The 900 pages of documents were obtained by The Intercept through ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation against the National Institutes of Health. The collection includes specific information regarding EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization, and its use of federal funding to research bat coronaviruses. The outlet also received two grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Gary Ruskin, executive director of the U.S. Right to Know, said this is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic. But instead of taking it from TimPiast.com or, I mean, and with all due respect, this is information coming from The Intercept, who did the work on this one, my respect. We have this statement from Richard H. Ebright, verified on Twitter, so you know he's legit. Board of Governors, Professor of Chemistry

and Chemical Biology at Rutgers. He cites the articles and then some quotes from the article and then says, the materials show the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts

to the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded gain of function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014 and 2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017 to present. He says this has been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant but this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and full proposals of the 2017 grant and he ends by saying this because we don't read through everything but it is particularly damning the documents make it clear that

assertions by the nih director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are untruthful. To put it very simply, he is saying Fauci lied, Francis Collins lied. And now I think most of us realized this, but well, now we have the documents. What I think is particularly fascinating is the intercept of all places that published this. And so for what it's worth, we'll kick it off with something I saw from Glenn Greenwald. He said if he was going to make a bet, it was that they were trying to actually defend Fauci.

And they may have accidentally just proven he lied. I don't know what your thoughts on this matter, uh, Zed. Yeah. I mean, I can only speculate about why they did it. Cause,

um, I wasn't in touch with any of these reporters. I still, I still know some people over there, but I wasn't in touch with any of the reporters who did this story. Um, I do think though that if that's what they were trying to do it, you know,

it speaks well to them that they would publish anyway. I think we need more of that in journalism is that you have a certain worldview or you have a certain hypothesis about the world. You go out there, you look for evidence, and maybe what you find disproves that, but you publish it anyway. I mean, that's what they do in science, what scientists are supposed to do. That's what the peer review process and the journal process is all about. And so I think if that is what Glenn is saying is true, it would actually speak well of The Intercept, that they decide to publish something that goes against their worldview, which unfortunately I think is something that you see

less and less of in a lot of these outlets these days. You mean like real journalism? Yeah, I mean it's literally, journalism is about, you know, journalism comes from the word journaling, meaning that you're describing or you're narrating the world as it is in front of you. You don't really do that when you start leaving out facts,

when you start skewing things towards a particular perspective. There is a place for that. It's called advocacy, right? It's called activism. It's what politicians do. It's what people who are lobbyists do, people in the nonprofit world often do. And that's fine.

And it's even, I would say, I would even argue it's fine to have journalists who have that particular perspective and are going to go at it from that point of view. But it becomes a real problem when so much of the journalistic world has converted itself into activism because you're not getting people who are just calling balls and strikes. You're not getting people who are willing, who have the resources and the prestige and credibility to go out and find the facts, who will actually be able to report them even if they go against those preconceived notions or worldviews. It's kind of a damning, it's kind of a condemnation

of activism. The idea that activists who are supposedly fighting for something good are lying to you. I mean, that's just reality, right? Maybe propaganda is a better word for it. You know, I'd like to imagine that as an activist, if you come across information that disproves what you're trying to push, you'd be like, oh, I was wrong about that. I once did fundraising for an environmental nonprofit. They gave us information on Deepwater Horizon. They sent us out to the streets to go ask people for money because they're like, we want to raise awareness, like literally on the ground telling people there's an oil spill. And then I was reading what they had given us in terms of their script and everything. And then some guy stopped and said, you're lying. That's not what happened. Here's the news. Here's what happened. And I was like, for real? When I called

my bosses and said, hey, this is not true. They said, oh, just keep reading it anyway. You're fine. And I was like, what? If we're not out here to tell the truth, to tell people there's a problem and we're misinforming them, why would I do this? tend to, just by the nature of their job, they tend to skew the truth or they tend to arrange facts in a certain way. I mean, I wouldn't expect like the NRA to start saying, okay, well, here's all the flaws with having liberal gun policy or like letting everybody own a gun. And I wouldn't expect the Brady control to be saying, here's 10 reasons why you might want to own a gun for self-defense, right? Like we all anticipate that.

But what happens when you start seeing like CNN or the Associated Press taking more strident ideological or partisan positions and they start being the ones who won't be telling you both sides of the story? I think that is when it really gets dangerous for democracy. Absolutely. Yeah. And let's let's throw it back to these fact checks on this reporting. When Rand Paul was clashing with with Dr. Fauci, the craziest thing to me is that Rand is literally like, here's a study. It says something like rich gene pool, bat coronavirus or whatever. And he's like, it says in the study that you were

making chimeric viruses, you were increasing infectivity, and this was funded by you. It says NIH. And then Fauci's like, no, that wasn't gain of function. And the way I describe it is like, imagine if a guy was on trial for theft. And he says, Your Honor, I didn't steal that piggy bank from that man's house. I simply walked into his house without permission, took the piggy bank and walked out with it. That's not theft. Like you literally just defined theft, right? But what do we end up seeing? A bunch of fact checking outlets misrepresenting what Rand Paul said. Many left or liberal establishment outlets started saying Fauci owns Rand Paul. And they were highlighting a lot of things like Fauci saying, you have no idea what you're talking about, instead of actually the merit of this research study.

The craziest thing was how Reddit, which is like just bots, basically. Reddit is a bunch of bots who just pump stories to push propaganda. And there were still people breaking through being like, I'm confused why we're mad at Rand Paul here. He's right. The study says, you know, that this happened. So this is what's crazy to me. It's good the Intercept published this. Like you said, it actually reflects well upon them if they were actually doing this to prove Rand Paul wrong.

They decided to publish anyway. BuzzFeed's done similar things where they just – they publish good stories. But what happened – what do we say about all these outlets that dismiss the story as fake news, as they've been doing with basically everything like Hunter Biden's son? What does that say about journalism today? Yeah, and I think this is a big theme of a lot of our recent posts at inquiremore.com, which is a sub stack that we run, which is that I think that a lot of journalists now, they're having to choose between two missions. One mission is basically the traditional journalism, going out, discovering things about the world, describing it as the facts as they see them. The other one is to promote a certain worldview, to promote a certain set of values, right?

And so I think that if something like a virus has become politicized, which it has been in the United States, there's actually like a red position and a blue position a democratic position republican position everything covid related now unfortunately uh more so here in this country than anywhere else in the world i'd say also which is an unfortunate aspect of it now that you have journalists who kind of adopted this sort of post-journalist post-journalism mindset which is basically an advocacy or activist mindset i think they see their goal and their role as basically debunking or disproving whatever this quote unquote Republican position on coronavirus is. We saw this earlier in the pandemic when they were all making fun of the idea that a lab leak may have been responsible for the pandemic. Now, we don't know where coronavirus or COVID-19 came from. Strictly

speaking, we don't know. We don't have the evidence for it. But they were so quick to dismiss this theory. And now, you know, even the Biden administration is keeping an open mind about it. Even they have not reached a firm conclusion on whether or not that's true with the might of, you know, more than a dozen intelligence agencies looking at it. So I think that when you have journalists adopt hard positions, rather than keeping an open mind, rather than being curious and actually working to discover the world and report out the facts, you do get things like a Rand Paul being mocked and made fun of because they made up their minds before that hearing ever happened. They were going to take Fauci's side. They were going to be against Rand Paul. They were going to poke holes in Rand Paul's argument. They weren't going to do it in Fauci's arguments.

And that prevents them from actually being able to do what was done in this case with the hundreds of pages of documents that were obtained through the FOIA by the Intercept, which to actually go and look at the facts and see what happened. Literally see what happened and tell people what happened and don't have an opinion about it. Don't tell people how they should feel, but literally give them the information that any reasonable person would need to know how to think about this problem or how to think about the actual origins of this virus. There is still a challenge with this report, and that's who was chosen by the outlet as an expert. And so we're sitting here being like, wow, you know, this professor at Rutgers has said these things that are untruthful. And of course, there's confirmation

bias there. There have been several instances where we have seen experts chosen because their expert opinion might fit a specific narrative now this one's interesting because the intercept had no reason to choose a professor who would actually say you know fauci lied so in fact i have reason to believe this is likely the case likely true if you've like you you see this all the time where they'll be like you know a feminist professor agrees with us that feminism is good and i'm like yeah well that's obvious isn't it or you know this this critical race theorist proponent is quote is is considered an expert on this release of documents and they're going to say something positive but when you see a left or right wing outlet actually saying hey

the other side's actually right on this one or this here's evidence to suggest i'm like that's probably when it's true like it's so glaringly true this story that even the intercept had to be like, yeah, Fauci lied. I mean, but here's the best part. The Intercept doesn't mention Fauci. They don't mention he lied. They just say, hey, here's some information. And then, when

you read it, you're like, wait a minute. Sounds like Fauci lied. Is the guy going to get arrested, charged? Probably not. Because I guess we don't have accountability in this country. But I will say, you know, when you're talking about journalism, I don't know what happened, but maybe journalists didn't do enough to inspire the true tenets of journalism in the younger generation. Or the activists got in the colleges and turned J school into activism indoctrination camp or something. Look, I think part of this wasn't, you know, I was working at ThinkProgress, which was like a left-leaning blog in 2009, which is part of a left-leaning think tank.

And I think a big part of it was that we had a frustration always that we felt like the news would be reporting two sides. You know, side A says something, side B says something. And, oh, side B totally lied, but the news didn't really call them on it. The news just kind of weighed them equally. And, you know, they call that false equivalence and so on and so forth. And there were times, I think, when news outlets were doing that, they were getting stories very wrong, just because they weren't actually investigating what was true, because they were trying to provide balance to the story. But I think they overcorrected for a lot of that by basically saying that we're basically now offering a justification for being openly biased right one side is clearly wrong there's no point to go to

them and get comment from them there's no point to go and even investigate whether what they said is true they're clearly wrong just as just as most of the press said that it was clearly wrong that there was a lab leak that resulted in covid19 which is a conclusion now that even the intelligence community says is actually possible they don't have. They don't have a firm conviction on it. So I think that one, there was an overcorrection. And two, I think that it's just a reality that a lot of the younger generation tends to be left-leaning. And I think that those are the sorts of people that tend to go into these industries or these fields. If you go to your average publication, even if it's something very mainstream like ABC News or CNN, I will tell you

like nine out of 10 people who work there vote for Democrats, you know, or they're left-leaning publication, even if it's something very mainstream like ABC News or CNN, I will tell you like nine out of 10 people who work there vote for Democrats, you know, or they're left-leaning or they're liberals. And I think that just having that level of like, you know, cloistered communities of people makes it much easier to just become very biased and not have anyone call you on it, not have anyone push back and not have anyone at least provide a dissenting opinion. Even if like, I would say 60% of journalists were left-leaning or liberals, it'd probably still be okay because you'd still have enough like conservative leaning people around or

people who have an open mind towards that point of view to say, hey, you need to consider X, Y, or Z, or we need to go and interview one additional person here to provide that alternative point of view. But I think when it's so overwhelming in a lot of these institutions and institutions that feed journalism, you know, for instance i wrote a report uh actually for the intercept a few years ago about how the majority of editors and reporters at the new york times and the wall street journal both came from a small sliver of elite colleges like and we're talking about i don't know how many colleges it was probably under 30 or something like they come from a very tiny slice a tiny educational and

cultural segment of the united states and i think when you're so closer when you're so segregated from the rest of the country it becomes much easier to develop groupthink it becomes much easier uh to avoid any kind of dissenting opinion or at least one person in the room is going to stand up and say hey we need to consider this other other side of this we need to report the other side of it because otherwise we're not telling the whole story because i think a lot of these journalists honestly do think they're telling the entire story they think what they're saying is completely uncontroversial and you have to be kind of nuts to disagree that's

that's honestly what they think i don't think it's a conspiracy it's just like a confluence of of these kind of influences and these kind of cultures i don't know i think a lot of them have uh gone off like i think a lot of them are evil right and and i'll break that down because evil is not a light word to throw around i mean they they actively understand they're omitting information like the daily beast for instance like the daily beast is just notorious there's no way some of these articles that come out you're going to tell me this guy believes he's telling the truth because some of these things that are said are so absurd on their face you're like how is that even no but they'll write it they'll publish it because their lawyers tell them like yeah you'll be safe on that

one when you see when you see these publications putting out things that are just so over the top you're like how could that possibly be true but they don't care they don't i don't think they think they're telling the truth well i think that there's probably two things happening simultaneously one i think there's a lot of these news outlets have shifted to basically subscriber kind of, you know, this is a subscriber business model because the advertising business model was being basically dominated by a few digital firms like Google and Facebook. And so they wanted subscribers. New York Times shifted heavily toward subscribers after Trump was elected. So one, they have a financial incentive to cater to a certain worldview and a certain type of person uh that person is not going to complain that much if they get stories wrong as long as those stories have the right sort of like you know oh you smeared a republican who cares the

republicans are all evil anyway they probably deserve they had it coming right so that's happening and at the same time they're hiring up people who legitimately believe a lot of these things right who really deeply firmly believe that even if their story isn't 100% fair, it overall is going in the right direction. So I'll give you an example. You know, ivermectin, which is this drug, some people are using it for COVID-19. It's being called a horse dewormer or a horse drug in a lot of like major press and major mainstream media. I criticize this. And there were journalists who were very defensive and say, okay, maybe it's not exactly right. That's just a horse drug. Okay, maybe it's used for humans sometimes and it's prescribed for parasitic diseases.

But the other side is just thinking, you know, the other side is just crazy. They're all conspiracy nuts. So, like, they see themselves as part of an ideological battle. And as long as they're on the right side of that, even if they're not being 100% fair, honest journalists, they still see themselves as morally justified. I think that's why they don't see themselves as evil, right? It's activism.

So here's where I fall with the whole ivermectin thing. There's conflicting studies. Data's inconclusive. FDA has not authorized or approved its use pertaining to COVID. But the World Health Organization says that it's an essential medicine, that it's used for treating river blindness, that it's basically eradicating this one parasite. And there are people who are doing, I think people who are eating horse-based are absolutely wrong to do it. And you know what? We know they're doing it because we had Dr. Chris Martinson come on this show and say that people were going to tractor supply and doing it. I'm like, you shouldn't do

that. There's a lot of reasons why you shouldn't do that. But to then go out and say, Joe Rogan announced he's taking a horse dewormer. It's like, no, he didn't because there's tractor supplies, horse dewormer. And then there's going to Walgreens to pick up your prescription. Your doctor told you to get. Now it's getting so over the top that there's tractor supplies horse dewormer, and then there's going to Walgreens to pick up your prescription your doctor told you to get. Now it's getting so over the top that there's apparently reports that certain pharmacies won't even fill prescriptions. Like, yo, pharmacist, you don't know what the prescription's for. If a doctor prescribes it, just say okay. You're not the doctor.

But that's the problem of hyperpolarization that we're seeing. But we'll jump to this story because we have a pretty good example. Oh, I'm so happy to be using this source. From Gawker.com. Snap. I love it. Gawker, as you may know,

is back for like the second time, I think. Or like, you know, it's Hulk Hogan, Peter Thiel, lawsuit, Gawker collapses,

it tries to relaunch, it fails, it relaunches again. Gawker, of course, is mostly not great journalism, but I want to use this source because I find it to be just so funny. Gawker says, Rachel Maddow wards off disinfo with disinforming tweet. Glenn Greenwald is right about this one. I love that they're insulting Glenn Greenwald in this. They say, something has happened,

a rare thing that used to happen all the time, but now arrives roughly every 18 months like a solar eclipse. Glenn Greenwald has posted something factually correct and only minimally annoying. Specifically, yesterday he tweeted about the Rachel Maddow show. Rachel Maddow tweeted, quote, patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances. Quote, the scariest one I've heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss, he said. Glenn Greenwald says Rolling Stone has now issued a second update that effectively retracts its false story that gunshot victims are waiting in ER rooms in Oklahoma due to overflow from ivermectin poisoning. Yet Maddow still has her tweet up from four days ago, promoting it with no subsequent

note. Last week, the MSNBC pundit boosted a hoax story on ivermectin overdoses, joining a slew of liberal media outlets in mindlessly digesting the disputed news and another stern missive about COVID-related disinformation. In her rush to warn viewers of the dangers of misinformation, she did not have time to fact check. Oh, that's a bit generous. Like she ever does. Come on. Unlike several other outlets, Maddow still hasn't deleted, updated, or clarified the error. The original story came from a local NBC affiliate. All right, so let's break this one down really quickly. A doctor says he was misquoted. He wasn't saying that all of

these hospitals were overflowing the beds. He's saying there were some times that there were some congestion, and some of it was because one guy may have taken too much ivermectin. They ended up issuing, the Northeastern Health System, Sequoia, ended up issuing a statement saying the guy doesn't work for us. We have not treated anybody for ivermectin. The story is fake news. And yet, Rachel Maddow still has it up. Now, here's what I love. Hey, good job, Gawker. I don't know why they're insulting Glenn Greenwald.

He's right. You don't got to. Sure, I guess they're trying to be edgy. But I'll tell you this. If Gawker can come back and insult people they don't like and whatever, but still be correct, I welcome it entirely. By all means, they can call Glenn Greenwald every name in the book. That's wonderful if the facts are true and correct.

Now, what I'll say about this is, my friends, I have seen stories and heard anecdotes of people eating this horse paste stuff. Don't do that. Because what people, here's the problem the stuff from the store that people don't understand it's uh it's it's this tube is for a 1250 pound horse what they're saying with with these with this doctor saying it's not that you know all ivermectin is horse dewormer like the media is doing they're saying some people went to tractor supply bought this stuff ate a whole tube that was meant for a 1250 pound horse that, right? And then they get sick because of it. Now, I don't know exactly

what's happening after the fact. They're saying people get vision loss and there's some crazy stories, but I'm going to tell you, it's really hard to believe some of the over the top stories because of how much the media has lied, how much we've heard from like lying nurses. There was one nurse who was like, someone came in, held my hand and said, I wish I had been vaccinated before they passed. And I'd tell his family. And then someone looked up that there was like no one, no one in these age groups who had died in these hospitals. Like a lot of these stories are completely exaggerated.

The problem is we got two things going on. The media is going completely over the top, calling all ivermectin horse dewormer. Like when Joe Rogan says he's taking it clearly came from a. And they're conflating that with people eating horse paste. So then you get people on one side who are like, I tell you this, there are people who just adamantly believe ivermectin is a gift, that it's great. And we don't really have great conclusive, we don't have good conclusive data on this right now. We've got some studies, some promising studies, some inconclusive studies, and a whole lot of me being like, yo, if I'm going to be honest with you, I honestly don't know. Brett Weinstein can say one thing that's fine, but we just don't know. And so ultimately what

ends up happening is you've got something that's not FDA approved, not FDA authorized. And there's a lot of arguments about why that is or isn't, but ultimately I just, I defer to the slew of studies that have conflicting information. And then you get the culture war in this, saying people who believe in ivermectin saying the media is lying. Therefore, it must be true. People on the left saying ivermectin is horse dewormer and mocking everybody, ignoring the actual nuance of the whole situation. And then YouTube banning people who dare talk about it.

So at this point, I'm just basically like, yo, I don't even care anymore. Like YouTube has gone so off the rails. They gave Crowder a strike for citing the CDC. I don't know how we navigate this other than just talking about it and just saying what, you know, what we think.

I mean, this Oklahoma story in particular, because we just wrote a post about that at the Substack on Enquire. And, you know, when you just get the details of the story,

like if you read, like, the, you know, five-sentence summary of it, it doesn't sound believable, right? Rural Oklahoma is being overwhelmed with gunshot victims. And those victims cannot get into the hospitals because so many people are taking this ivermectin, which is a drug that, honestly, most people probably have never even heard of. I mean, unless you're really plugged in and following all this, you've probably never heard of it. And yet this story, not only did it get tweeted by Rachel Maddow, it got featured on Joy Reid's MSNBC show, The Rolling Stone, Insider. It was all over the place. Like, it was all over the world.

It was viral. If you go to that hospital's website now, they have a huge splash page up that says, hey, look, we're taking people. We're not overwhelmed. Don't worry about being turned away, which is very important because rural hospitals are a real asset to those communities. You might have to drive five hours to get to another hospital because there aren't that many hospitals in these rural communities and rural areas. So actually

it's kind of a dangerous thing for people to believe that you can't get to the hospital. So what I did, what I did is I just called and I sent an email to the local police and the sheriff and I asked them, like, dude, what's this story all about? Are you guys having a bunch of gunshot victims? What's up? And the sheriff in Sequoia County in oklahoma told me no it's a ridiculous story we've only had we've had one uh shooting victim who died this year and we had one

other gunshot victim who went to the hospital he's treated and he's fine so literally you know there's two people who are shot this entire year in this county they're not overflowing gunshot victims and yet why was the media running this story? Because it confirmed a bunch of biases. You know, you got the yokel, the rednecks, all shooting each other with their guns. Yes. With their guns. And they're all eating horse face because they're really stupid. Beautiful.

So, of course, it's true. We don't have to call a hospital. We don't have to call the sheriff and just ask them whether it's true. How much? So, Zed, this must have been an extremely rigorous investigation. You must have put a $200,000 budget behind this. I mean how much time did it take you to pick up your phone and press a few digits? It probably took me – between all the emails and calls, it probably took me half an hour to figure this out, right?

As a freelancer writing on my sub stack with one other friend who kind of looks over my stuff, right? I don't have the resources of MSNBC or Rolling Stone or Insider or all the places that ran this story. But what I do have is this idea that journalists should tell the truth and get the facts. And that even if people shouldn't be taking ivermectin unless it's prescribed by their doctor, and it's going to be prescribed for things besides COVID

because it hasn't been approved for COVID, we shouldn't lie about what ivermectin is and what it's doing. You know, you should never lie. I think our top, our utmost, look, I think there's a lot of journalists who think if tomorrow they told people that you would explode if you took ivermectin, they would do it. They're doing it. They're now putting out a story that says 85% of people in Nigeria who took ivermectin were sterilized. And that is not true but you have to understand why they think this is justified they think because they have this overall activist

goal of not having people take this drug because overall i think the drug is harmful for you so because of that fudging facts are not quite getting it right it's it morally pales in comparison you know to what to what might actually happen in their minds if people take the drug. So to them, the telos or the goal of truth has been supplanted by this larger moral goal of taking the correct position on COVID, taking the correct position on ivermectin. And this exact bug of post-journalism, this narrative journalism, has infected so many different parts of the media industry right now to where I think we're going to continue to see stories like this over and over and over because again a lot of journalists they don't care about telling the whole truth about something they just want to tell you enough information to achieve

whatever goal they're there they they want and that's not very different from what the nra or the brady campaign do when they're arguing about gun control or any other type of activism let me pull up this tweet i was just digging around for. So this guy tweets, Today I learned ivermectin apparently sterilizes the majority, 85% of men that take it. Now this guy is not a journalist. He's an activist. And there are a bunch of activists pushing this out. And I don't see journalists pushing this narrative out.

But it goes to show you the gradient between activists and journalists and how news organizations have become activists. but they still won't go too far. So there is a study that I think looked at 385 people in Nigeria, and then they reduced it down to like 37 people and then tracked their sperm counts. It turns out that nine of those people, I guess, or whatever the number was were were unaffected or something so the overwhelming majority or maybe i don't nine is maybe the wrong number i don't know all you need to know is it's a study it is a tiny sample it is inconclusive activists are sharing it clearly to smear this medication here's a need to understand about how deep this lie cuts. These tweets are going viral. This tweet has 7,500 retweets from this guy.

It is insane to state this. You want to know why it's insane? The lie that they are pushing is not about ivermectin and sterilizing people. If what they're claiming is true, it would mean that the World Health Organization has been administering millions of doses of a drug sterilizing black men in Africa. Now, that is an insane proposition, which I think is over the top.

The World Health Organization has ivermectin on its list of essential medications for curing river blindness. 99% because I looked this up. I went to the World Health Organization, 99% of river, it's Oncoker, how do you, Oncoker, I can't say it. River blindness. River blindness, there you go. Oncoker psoriasis or something. Anyway, 99% are in impoverished African communities. That's where they're saying we need to be giving ivermectin specifically for this parasite. Now, if it was true that there was a study showing it was sterilizing these people,

what do you think these people would start doing? I mean, I'm sorry, not even if it was true. I mean, it's a horrifying prospect about what these people think the World Health Organization is doing, which they're not doing. Tons of people were like, rest assured, these people are having healthy families and babies. This is a lie. But now look at the fake news. Imagine somebody's living in Africa and they know somebody with river blindness. And these activists are putting out lies to thousands upon thousands of retweets. And these people have the internet.

And what happens when someone says, look, look, look, look, it's going to hurt you. The white people are coming and they're going to hurt you. And they stopped taking it. Because when Ebola broke out, so I know journalists who went and covered Ebola. They went on the ground in some of these villages. And people would break out of quarantine because they thought the doctors coming to treat them were actually hurting them. And they were all superstitious. And they believed that you could transfer the curse and things like that. If you have impoverished and uneducated villages, and we are desperately trying to help cure their ailments and educate them and teach them,

what happens when these activists start pumping out insane lies? Rachel Maddow's lies. When they're saying that ivermectin is a horse dewormer, all of those lies from the media are going to be scaring people who were already worried about being manipulated you've already got you know joe biden talking about the tuskegee experiments granted he said tuskegee airmen you know but you get the point and by the way like the new york times had an article about the percentage of young african-americans uh in new york city who've been vaccinated i think it's something like 27 or something when they wrote it.

It's probably gotten higher since then. But they interviewed some people, and some people were saying, you know, why am I scared of COVID? I'm way more scared of getting shot by the police. It's like, you know, the news media spent, you know, 18 months or so, I don't know how long, but around that, probably longer if you count back out to

2014 or Ferguson, telling people to be scared to death of getting shot by the cops, particularly if you're African-American. Now you have people going around and just random people are being interviewed on the streets saying, no, I'm way more scared of getting shot by the cops than I am by COVID. You know, like 700,000 people in the United States have been killed by COVID-19, right?

Around 1,000 people a year are shot and killed by police officers. I mean, it's very easy math to say that COVID is much, much bigger risk than police shootings. But I think if you went back to these journalists who promoted a lot of the police shooting stories and asked them, well, why didn't you at least put some statistical context in there? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? They'd probably say, are you minimizing the shooting of black men by police officers?

I'm like, no, I just want you to report the truth. I want you to report the totality, the context, the statistical data that would let people know what the actual risk looks like for them, because it has a real practical meaning to people's lives. Yeah. One of the things that we've talked about quite a bit is that you've got kids growing up with Facebook being inundated with nothing but videos of police brutality, and then genuinely believing that cops are doing this every day. They're actively seeking people out. I mean, we've heard BLM activists say like, oh, they're hunting us down. And that's just not true. But

I don't think it's as activist-y. I mean, maybe it is. Maybe it's activists who are watching. Imagine you're 10 years old. You're inundated by nothing but these videos. Now you're 18, 20, you're in college, you get out, you go get a job at, you know, Vox or whatever, and you believe it. So you start writing it. But I do think there's a lot of people when they give you their excuses, their justifications, it's because they're grifters. It's because they're like, dude, I got 2 million clicks on that. My boss paid me a bonus. I'm not going to admit I did wrong, right?

These people are unwilling to correct the record because it's the rage that gets them the traffic. Now, me, I got to be honest. I think what gets me the traffic is admitting when I'm wrong. I think the viewers we have are specifically here because we do corrections and we will admit when we're wrong. And I'm really strict with TimCast.com on like any change, anything, punctuation. I want a note saying what we changed and why.

I want a record of that. So people go there can see it. Media doesn't do that. I think you've got true believers who have been indoctrinated, and I think you've got to... I think the grifters are on the way out, to be honest. And now you're getting true believers coming in. They've eaten their own...

They've fed this refuse to the children, and that's probably why you don't get journalists anymore. You get activists. Well, you know, there was an analogy. I did some work for an organization that was headed by Jonathan Haidt, a a social psychologist there's a really good analogy for changing your beliefs instead of thinking about as a switch like okay i either believe this or i believe that it's on and off think about it like a dimmer right like oh i'm maybe 70 sure about this thing but you know i can i can change it to 50 if someone gives me some new information some new evidence

because it really is about tying up with your ego. And I think you're exactly right that like, when we have response systems now, or like gamified, you know, we have a gamified world where you're given a certain amount of like, you know, happy feelings, from taking a certain position for making a certain stance from describing the world in a certain way. You don't want to lose those feelings by saying, maybe I was wrong, maybe I should change my mind mind about this maybe it's a little bit different we've set up incentive systems that make us behave in like really anti-social and like anti-intellectual ways and i think your practice that you just described is very healthy it's like you're setting up a new incentive system for yourself you're saying actually my viewers really like appreciate it

when i admit that maybe i you know i was wrong about something or maybe it's a little bit different than i thought before my opinions opinions change not all the time but periodically, like fairly absolute on 2A. I used to be like, well, there's got to be some things we can do. We need to have conversations. There's urban versus rural, and now I'm at this point where I'm like, everybody gets guns. Government should be giving guns away for free. Give everybody guns.

I'm half kidding. I do argue, and this is important, why the government should give away free guns is that the right never fights for anything. And they say, you know, a lot of the conservatives are like, it's because we don't think the government should be providing these things. And I'm like, well, here's the imbalance. The left will demand universal health care. They'll demand government do things for them. And then all the conservatives will do is say no. Conservatives never actually advocate for things on their own within reason.

And it doesn't have to be about giving someone something. But I'm actually taking this from Michael Malice. God, we quote this guy too much. But he said the left demands universal health care. The right doesn't demand universal gun access. But I will say the real argument is where are the republicans coming out and demanding a repeal of the national firearms act where the conservatives coming out and saying we don't want the government to do things we want

to reduce they don't do that so you end up with the left constantly demanding things and taking it and the right doing a whole lot of just saying stop yeah i mean i've written a couple pieces actually for the washington is the eminentiner, which is a DC-based magazine that's right-leaning, it's kind of center-right, or right of center, about sort of the debates within the conservative movement, about where their governing philosophy should be going in the next few years.

And I think for many years, the conservative movement has basically been tantamount, in many ways, to the libertarian movement, right? Their general philosophy is government should take the hands-off stuff, we should spend general philosophy is government should take the hands off stuff. We should spend less money. We should have less regulations. And we should just embrace personal responsibility and individual freedom.

I think there is a rethink happening about that in many parts of the right right now. It's not a dominant philosophy. It's not something you'd see the McCarthys and McConnells of the world embracing. But I do think you're seeing some people in the Senate and the House and a lot of people on the intellectual right starting to say hey look uh we can't really respond to the collapse of the family by just talking about another tax cut right like right you know it's not that you should never cut taxes you should never deregulate anything but there has to be kind of a broader kind of social and political and economic agenda than i think just the libertarian

mottos and it's really interesting and kind of what you just said about guns because i think one one way that gun policy may be different in some parts of the world is that they you know like gun ownership in a place like switzerland right like people it's not super unusual to like have have like training for your firearm to have a firearm they often keep them locked up or they keep the ammunition separate or something but like they they see they don't necessarily see it as antagonistic to gun rights to have the government involved in it at some level whereas here in the u.s the debate is very polarized or there's some people who just absolutely hate guns and don't think anyone should own one and then there's other people who just you know they think everyone and their mom and their baby should own a gun but like they aren't

necessarily saying okay the government should put together uh you know a really cool training course and give it to people give it to kids when they hit high school in this rural area where a lot of people own guns and actually get people's buy-in and confidence and get people who are not gun enthusiasts thinking, okay, there's a way they can use these things safely and there's a way we can make sure people have access to them and good training and so on and so forth. Yeah, the gun thing, I think, is one of the most glaring examples of the media lying or having no idea what they're talking about. And so, like, very early on in the gun debate, I just would do basic research as a journalist, and I tried to learn more and more and more about how, you know, wrong the media was. And they're still wrong to this day, constantly saying things that make no sense, advocating for the ban of things that don't do anything. The example I love to give is that in Maryland, the M1A is banned as an assault weapon, but the SCAR-20S is not.

And for people who know anything about guns, you'd probably be like, that's a weird thing to do because the M1A is a great weapon. But the SCAR-20S is more customizable, adaptable, easier in a lot of ways, I suppose, but just more modern and better. And I guess depending on who you ask, some people might like the M1A. But the fact of the matter is this is what you get from media disinformation. You get policies that make no sense, and you get the escalation and the indoctrination. So actually taxes are a really great idea. We've talked about taxes quite a bit. I think, Ian, you were the one mentioning that early on the first income tax was like 2% or something.

Oh, I don't know the number. We were having a conversation a while ago and you were like, initially the income tax was going to be like, it was only for the rich and it was only supposed to be like 2%. And they were like, it's just the rich. It won't affect you. And now here we are with like 35% to 45% total taxes, not just income tax. Like I think they say the average person will pay 45% of their income in taxes when it comes to sales tax, property tax, gas taxes, whatever, food, sales, all that stuff. And it used to be none.

But what happens is they'll come out and they'll say, we just want this teeny bit. You give them an inch to take a mile that's why the gun the gun rights advocates in this country are adamant about giving nothing away because they know that it's just chipping away at the block and eventually it's it's all gone did you look it up or yeah it was three percent 1861 president lincoln and that eventually i believe got repealed to later get recreated by the federal reserve in 1914 i think 1913 something like that yeah i mean they're one of the issues um where this where this headed up was school shootings right like people i think we had some very high profile school shootings in the united states

columbine in the 1990s they had newtown and parkland um is really shocked a lot of people's conscience it was heavily covering the media and I think it produced a policy response that was very well intended. I think people were legitimately scared for their children. But now I looked it up, and a majority of states, I think around a majority or at least half, actually require students in schools to do school shooting drills. Off the top of your head, do you know how many students die every year in a school shooting?

What's the number? It's 10. It's around 10 on average. And how many students die every year in a school shooting? What's the number? It's 10. It's around 10 on average, right? And how many students are there? 100 million. It must be 70, 75 million, something like that, under 18. So, you know, school shootings, of course, are tragic, but what's the impact of having, you know,

tens of millions of kids, you know, hiding in the hallways under desks, being in kind of a war posture, right, within their schools? Even Everytown, which is one of the gun control groups, did some studies on this and found that it increased anxiety, increased depression, and now they're advocating for reform, saying we shouldn't be doing, you know, all these all the time, because I think it was a knee-jerk reaction to a highly charged issue. And I think that we've seen a lot of that during COVID-19 as well, which is where people,

I think, you know, one of the phrases that comes to mind is better safe than sorry, right? You know, you can't overprotect someone. But what I always say is like, if you're overprotecting people from one thing, you could be underprotecting them from another thing, right? If we install all these measures on children against something which they almost completely unlikely they'll ever face it, we may be underprotecting them against things like anxiety, depression, you know, long-term kind of suicidal tendencies, all kinds of cognitive distortions about fear of things that really they shouldn't be all that afraid of. We're not thinking, you know, if you think entirely about protecting a population from one thing, you can underestimate the risk from

all sorts of other things. And I think reframing it that way might be one way for us to be able to rethink some of these like overreactions to some of these threats that we face historically. There's like a matrix kind of red pill, blue pill phenomenon I'm seeing from this that's causing, I'll just call it societal collapse. And what I mean to say is when you're inundated by a certain subject matter, school shootings, police brutality, whatever, on social media, and then the algorithm keeps feeding you that content, and then you come to perceive that as the only existence, as the real world, you're basically in this matrix. You are in the algorithm's world. Now, being fed these stories, you'll immediately become an advocate, saying,

like, we have to stop this. And you'll start giving your energy and power to politicians who don't actually care to solve any problems, just exploit your fears. And then there are people who are sort of awakened to this, right? So the blue pill, red pill, you're in, and I hate the political red pill, blue pill thing. But I mean, quite literally, like, there's an algorithm at play on social media, crafting a world for people that makes no sense because they click on police brutality and the algorithm says, let's give them more of that. It's good for business for the company that they're on the website more. So let's do more algorithmic content feeding. And then there are people who are just like, I'm sick of the algorithms.

I'm just going to shuffle it up. I want to, I want to read, I'm going to investigate on my own. And then they, they break out of that system and say, Hey, wait a minute, something's not right here. Now the problem is we're having this conversation about the rarity of school shootings, the rarity of unarmed black men being killed by police. Both circumstances are extremely awful and shouldn't happen. And we should do what we can to make sure they don't happen, but extremely rare. So for us to put 70-something million kids through school shooting trainings, because you said, what did you say? Ten will die. I think on average it's ten.

It may be a little bit more some years than others. But generally speaking, more kids die in pool drownings or in some kind of drowning. Like swim lessons would be more useful for children than school shooting drills. Let's see. Here's what happens. The people who live in the matrix, in this algorithm or this media narrative or clickbait, ragebait, grifter, whatever, start voting for policies based on a fake worldview that was fed to them to make money. And that's why I think it's gotten so substantially worse to the point where it's like, you know, we feel like we're at each other's throats. There was literally a shootout this

past weekend. One of the, I guess, a proud boy got shot. They were shooting at him and he took a bullet in the leg. It was, I don't know if he was a proud boy. It was the guy tiny. I thought he was patriot pair, but people are saying proud boy. And there was a shootout a couple of weeks ago in Portland as well, where thankfully nobody got hurt. But what happens is you have people who will vote, who will run for office. And it's, it's not just like you live in a matrix where there is an overseer keeping you in the matrix, like people believe that they saw the movie. No, no, no. The people who are running the matrix live in it too. The people who are taking the blue pill,

who believe that there is like a, it's a pandemic of police officers going around hunting down black people. They run for office based on that and then try and pass laws based on that. You try and tell them it's not real and they'll snap at you. They'll call you a Nazi, a fascist, all right. They got to protect that worldview. I don't know how you break out of that. I mean, look, the other day, something I've been writing about is basically pandemic responses across the world.

Because one thing I noticed is that the U.S. response when it comes to children is very different than most of the world, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand. You know, we're requiring masks in most school districts in the United States, even for children who are four or five years old, six years old, which actually is much more conservative than what the WHO recommends. It's more conservative than what the European health agencies are talking about, or most of the Australian districts. And, you know, to buttress my argument, you know, I just put out a basic graph from the CDC showing that child mortality, child deaths from COVID-19 are very, very small. They're a very small percentage and generally been the same throughout the pandemic.

And, you know, the instantaneous response you get to that is that you're minimizing the deaths of children. Right. Literally posted the facts straight from the cdc showing the context of this and i think that you know part of it is that i think once you've adopted the activist mindset of the moralizing mindset you have one goal in mind that goal of course is protecting children from covid 19 it's totally understandable goal but at the same time when you're not getting the whole picture you're not looking at all the other possible ramifications of keeping kids in this crisis mode for basically forever. And you're not considering the points of view of other people in the world who are not doing that. You know, in British schools, they're not doing that. In Australian schools, they're not doing that.

They're using largely rapid testing, social distancing, some vaccinations at the higher level, like 16 and 17-year-olds maybe are getting vaccinations. But they're not having toddlers running around in masks for the most part. And UK has had the Delta variant. You know, they've had this experience. They've seen this movie, and yet they're not doing it. I think we're not really giving any weight to their concerns because we fixate so much on one problem. And that, I think, is really, you know,

not only is it corrupting journalism, it's corrupting society because I think we need to be well-rounded people, right? A bird can't fly with just one wing. You've got to have two wings, right? You've got to be able to understand things from more than one point of view. And you have to be able to look at more than one problem in society, because I think we've created a lot of problems for ourselves by not doing that. I think things like certain kinds of over-parenting, certain kinds of over-scheduling children. You know, I talk to kids these days about like what they do. I do some community work

with children, and I talk to like some kids about, you know, what's their summer like? And they're saying, oh, you know, I go to band camp, then I'm at, you know, algebra class. They have a full schedule. They're busier than I am during their summers, right? That's a huge change in society, you know, generational change versus what it was in the 1990s or early 2000s. And, you know, maybe there's some positive benefits for that. Maybe there's some drawbacks. But we have to be able to look at both sides of it. Otherwise, we're only seeing half the world. And we could be missing a lot of threats to our children if we continue to address,

or threats to anyone else if we continue to address social problems in that way. Perspective. You know, the difficulty is the hysteria. There's money to be made for the media. When, you know, a shooting happens, the media says, this is big, run it. I don't know if you saw the Project Veritas expose where they had the CNN guy being like, we just run the COVID death tracker because it plays well. It was gangbusters for the ratings. That's what they're thinking about, and it drives panic. And panic, you never want

to panic. You panic, you cause problems. If you're in a fire, the last thing you want to do is panic. You want to be calm, rational, be like, okay, here's what I got to do. Here's what I got. I got to feel the door. I'm going to get down, get under the smoke, all that stuff. Instead, the media just screams in everyone's faces at the top of their lungs, screaming panic. And then people panic and then they click more and then they get more, you know, they make more money, they make more ads, they get more subscriptions. And it all ends up, you know, going into every facet of society it's not just the media it's now in like uh regular businesses it's in the medic it's it's in like movie theaters

it's in um burger joints yeah i mean and look like panic is part of human nature for a reason it's in our evolutionary response if you see a saber-toothed tiger, maybe it might be a good idea to run and dart in the other way. Well, to be honest, if I saw a saber-toothed tiger, that'd be cool. I mean, like, whoa, I thought they were extinct. That's true. But that kind of evolutionary response or instinct is only useful in some select circumstances where you're really seeing a direct threat in front of you. Complex social problems really never really benefit from panicking.

And if you think about who we think of as the great leaders throughout history, whether they're generals or theologians or activists or so on and so forth, they generally had a calm, thoughtful, reasoned response to the social problems they were dealing with. I mean, we admire the SCLC and SNick and king's movement um when if you actually look at some of the old photos and i think it's actually it still exists the hylander center in tennessee where they were training civil rights activists they would have people sitting at like a lunch counter mock lunch counter someone will be pulling the hair another person will be blowing

smoke in their face and they will be training them just to like brush it off just say i don't care i'm going to keep keep on the course of action right that's those are the those are the modes of thinking or the temperament that you have to adopt when you're dealing with really complex high pressure problems at times and i think treating everything like it's you know the bear just walked into your camp and you better you better dart uh leads you astray a lot of the time and unfortunately i think that we have so much technology and so much of the commercial products that we use today are basically based on using that kind of response because that's what they want to bring out of you because that's what will make them money. Yeah, well, I don't know how you break that, right? I guess that's a problem of the free market, right?

That this system in place makes money, so it is being incentivized. You know, I'll go back to what I was saying about the algorithms feeding kids, this endless stream of police brutality stuff. Well, companies rose. It's very simple. Company A and Company B start up. Company A does legit fact-check journalism. Company B does rage bait activist stuff. Which one made the money?

So over the course of six months months the real news website does decently and the grifter outrage site makes tons of money and then the investors come in and say oh that one makes money let's do that one and now it's been a decade of this it's been 13 14 15 years of this and now we've built this massive ecosystem of hey we make money when we just tell people what they want to hear instead of informing them of the truth. It's not only that they make money doing that. I mean, well, it's not only that it generates money, generates revenue, but it's also very quick and easy to do. Think about how many articles you read. That's like, you know, three people tweeted something. It's mildly offensive, but by time you figure, you know, by time you get through the article,

it's going to be super offensive. It's gonna be like the worst thing in the world to you um it's super easy to run that article it probably gets hundreds of thousands of views if you're putting it up there it doesn't you don't have to spend money on investigating fact checking traveling uh you know foyer records requests none of that work it's extremely easy and i think that's part of why it's profitable because i do think that like well-produced good journalism does get a lot of viewers and readers i think people enjoy it and appreciate it but it's also more expensive to do right which is a challenge i think for a lot of people who are producing it and investing in it and unfortunately i think that's also created a situation where like a lot of good media isn't

necessarily profitable we are kind of like at the behest of like philanthropists and billionaires who want to spend money promoting something uh like pierre midiard did with the interceptor like peter teal is doing with some like alternative video platforms or things like that i don't i don't think it's all bad uh there was an episode that uh of joe rogan's show he did and i think it may have been with matt taibbi i'm not sure where they mentioned like anybody who goes for legit journalism right now is probably gonna make a killing you know it's and and we're already seeing with all these different sub-stacks popping up. I mean, Glenn Greenwald, you have a sub-stack, Michael Tracy, for instance, Matt Taibbi,

and apparently they're doing really, Barry Weiss, they're all doing really, really well. I mean, timcast.com is doing really, really well. And so I will say there's always a challenge in trying to figure out if you're actually doing the right job or if you're just, you know, partisan. But I think it's fair to point out, yeah, the establishment is just pushing narratives. Many of these outlets just want to stick to their worldview. Side with the audience, they call it. And if their audience is trapped in a whirlpool of fake news garbage and hating someone else, siding with the audience isn't the right thing you want to do.

No, you want to challenge. You don't even want to challenge. You want to be honest. So interestingly, you mentioned these articles where it's like they'll grab a few tweets and then post an article being like, you know, so-and-so said this. We've actually talked about this at TimCast.com because we've had a few articles where it's like so-and-so was criticized and then we show some tweets. And I'm like, we won't do that.

And I was like, hey, let's talk about this. It might be newsworthy. To be fair, it might be. Because if a congressperson makes an official statement about a specific policy that starts a feud or something and then you're pulling tweets, that may be something people want to know about. But I said, what we should do is if we see one of these Twitter spats, we're not just going to pull up someone on the right who's saying, F you. I want to see the left you know prominent personalities are saying and the right and then we want to actually break down the fact check of who's right and who's wrong now that's a little bit more work you actually do some journalism there but that's the way it should be conversations are happening on

twitter very important ones it's kind of silly in some ways but if a congress person is debating another congress person i think you know we want to talk about that look i think part of it also just like awareness i think we were i did some work earlier this year for a guy named justin rosenstein he was an early google and facebook guy he also co-founded asana he made like i don't know he's like probably a billionaire worth of his asana stock and facebook um and he his conclusion was that he created all these technologies to help people cooperate with each other and work together as teams. But they all kind of went awry and everyone hates each other. There's a lot of division and everything.

So basically he's giving away a ton of money through philanthropy and grant making because he feels guilty about all this. I think that, you know, he started this company with, he started these companies with like good intentions. Like he was one of the founders of like the Facebook like button. And like I think that they actively debated whether or not to make a dislike button but they were like we're not going to do that because it'll be negative it'll create negativity people will get fighting and all that stuff and but it ended up facebook like ended up like being pretty bad anyway because people are using it to share content this is like dissing someone or attacking some out group or something um but i think that you know there are large social and cultural changes that happen

once you're aware that something is a problem and i don't think that we looked at you know the youtubes and the social medias of the world and sort of the the echo chambers having polarization all this as a problem until very recently i think even if you go back to like 2009 2010 2011 we're talking about how these things were great we were all communicating with each other uh they were helping democrats in elections so democrats like them versus how they felt about trump using it in 2006 15 16 um or him using twitter um but i think now that we have the awareness of the problem i kind of feel like the solutions will bubble up as after the awareness is built because i think that's what's happened with other technologies that ended up

being harmful for us i think everything from we have much safer cars now with seat belts and air bags um to where we have a dramatic decline in smoking in the united states right smoking was an addictive product it was flying off the shelves making people at altria and so on and so forth tons and tons of money but i think once we recognize that there was a problem start educating people about it creating some alternatives some minor. I think we actually moved in a healthier direction. And I think something similar will happen with social media and a lot of what online monopolization has done to journalism. And part of that, I think, is antitrust, like getting very serious about the fact that these companies basically are the new Standard Oil. They are the new railroads.

And that creating alternatives to them and creating healthier modes and models is very, very difficult while they have such high market share. And I think more Democrats and Republicans in the Congress, you have Davis Isolini, who's the head of the relevant committee in Congress on antitrust, and Ken Buck, who's the ranking Republican, actually agreeing on a lot of the core antitrust issues with a lot of these big companies. It was funny that, like, I think a third of the Republicans in the Senate voted for Lena Kahn to join the FTC, who's a very progressive person who, in many ways, has talked about

breaking up companies like Amazon or turning them into public utilities or having utility regulation instead. So I think that we're seeing much more agreement that these things are a problem and some agreement on solutions. Now, does that mean, I think, that a year or two from now, we're seeing much more agreement that these things are a problem and some agreement on solutions now do what does that mean i think that a year or two from now we're going to have an entirely different uh online and social media environment which i think ultimately would impact the media environment no but i do think over the long term having that awareness and having that recognition is the first step towards creating something better this is different though right

with with these past things that were bad for us asbestos and smoking and lead gas and stuff like that. I mean, that was neutral-ish. It was public interest versus the special interest that had money around a specific product or practice. Now you've got half the country. So if we're talking about censorship and you have this major shift where all of a sudden the more establishment, like I, like the neocons and the Democrats are basically in favor of massive multinational corporations curtailing speech. I don't see us fixing that because that directly impacts who gets elected in the first place. When Jack Dorsey can ban negative news about Hunter Biden, well, then Hunter Biden's dad

gets elected. And depending on what you believe, I mean, there was a survey from Rasmussen, which found that if people had been informed, people didn't know about this, when they learned that Hunter Biden had done these things with Joe and these shady business deals, they would not have voted for him. The margin was massive or large enough to actually question, you know, it was like 10% of people said they wouldn't have voted for Biden had they known the truth. Well, we know that Facebook and Twitter suppressed negative news about a Democratic candidate. That being the case, why would any Democrat ever give in to any kind of legislative reform over these companies?

The antitrust stuff I can see, yes. I don't think it'll solve the problem, though. What people need to understand about Facebook and Google is that antitrust makes sense simply because we're not, you know, some people say, oh, but you know, who wants to use a bunch of different video platforms? We're not saying that. YouTube is a video platform. AdSense is an advertising platform. AdWords is an ad distribution platform. I mean, I think they changed, now it's just Google ads or whatever, But these are all different products. YouTube hosts your video and broadcasts it. Google sells ads on that.

Google buys and sells ads and distributes them. They also market your content to maximize viewership. These are different companies. In the past, you would find someone to record your music. You'd find someone to distribute your music. And then you would find people to record your music. You'd find someone to distribute your music. And then you would find people to promote your music on the radio. Today, YouTube, that's it. YouTube hosts and distributes.

They're the ones who do all the ad selling. And they're the ones who determine who's going to be on the front page. You could break them up into three companies. Antitrust could come in and say, you know, everybody likes YouTube because it's where the videos are. Okay, YouTube, you no longer can do the ads. We're breaking this up into different companies. And then all of a sudden you'd see way more competition and ad rates, probably ad rates would improve dramatically for a lot of people. You would then get people at YouTube basically being like, you know,

this would be interesting because there would have to be individual deals with your channel and YouTube as to how revenue is generated. It would be very, very complicated. It may actually even destroy YouTube because I don't know if YouTube is possible – if YouTube can even function without subsidy from Google in the first place. But if that's the case, there's a lot of questions we have to ask about major companies making tons of money doing one thing, subsidizing and cutting everyone else from the market by dumping money into another thing, right? So a better example is I won't name the big chain of coffee houses, of coffee shops, just for legal reasons. But I've heard these stories from local mom and pop cafes where a big chain shop opens up next door and sells coffee at ridiculous prices, ridiculously low. Because they're well-funded by a massive conglomerate, they can sell at a loss. It chokes out the mom-and-pop shop because now all of a sudden you've got people like,

why spend five bucks on my cappuccino when chain store has it for three bucks? Then once mom-and-pop goes out of business, chain store jacks the prices back up and now owns 100% of that market share. That's problematic. That's predatory behavior that we see a lot of. I know a lot of people on the right side, it's simply just, oh, it's free market capitalism. They're allowed to do it. And I'm like, I mean, that's brutal.

That's basically what YouTube does. Google just dumps money into these things. So Facebook, for instance, it's same thing, right? Facebook is a social network as well as advertising sales and promotion, marketing, all of these things. I think we could look at that and find a way to break it apart. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of this is going to depend on the right because I do think that the tech companies had the mindset that you were describing, that if they aggressively basically took the positions and the stances that the Democrats wanted in the 2020 election, he would avoid regulation from the Democrats when they took power.

It's not necessarily a super safe bet because the Democrats have their own grievances against tech, right? A lot of them think that tech doesn't censor enough, right? Right. And the Republicans think maybe it censors too much. But I think they run the risk by being so polarized towards the Democrats of actually radicalizing the Republicans. So I think that, you know, I was when I wrote my most recent article for The Examiner about big tech and the Republicans, you know, I asked Ken Buck's office about, you know, a few years ago, he was not talking about breaking up big tech companies. He wasn't even interested in the topic. And he was like, yeah, I went to a field hearing and a bunch of my constituents were talking about Amazon and how it was, you know, it was making it difficult for them to sell.

And like, you know, the Republicans are noticing what's happening to them. Right. So it may be that if the Republicans change their political orientation enough, you know, if they actually respond to events and not just respond with a bunch of slogans and mottos about tax cuts and deregulation, but if they actually see these companies as opposed to their base and they need to respond to their base, the next time they get enough power they would conceivably be able to either through legislation or through continuing to support people in the regulatory agencies be able to create the majority for things like breaking up the large companies imposing common carriage rules uh which would help against a lot of the discrimination and

censorship issues uh interoperability so that different people users from different companies can talk to each other so you know it won't be okay, I'm on a network with 500 people. So I can't talk to people who use Facebook, now you still would with interoperability. So I think that a lot of it really is the ball being in the Republicans court, there are enough Democrats, even though Democrats are more pro censorship, who do want to address the power of these companies, for one reason or another. And there are a growing number of Republicans. But I think as long as there's a core group of Republicans whose mantra is basically to look at what's happening to their base

and do nothing about it, which has been kind of the way they've responded to a number of social crises over the past generation or so, then I don't think much will happen. But I do think that if somebody like a Josh Hawley or a J.D. Vance or some of these people on the right who are very enthused about this issue are willing to work with Democrats on the issue. You know, Hawley supported Lena Kahn. He might have been the only Biden nominee that he supported, who's a very, you know,

very much to the left on this big tech issue. She probably wasn't the only one, but he voted against most of the nominees. So it was rare to see him support one. I do think if those people grow in influence and are able to make that argument to the base and mobilize that base against the establishment, then you'd really see movement on this issue. I think as long as you see one party that takes a complete laissez-faire attitude towards corporate concentration, which is what the Republicans have been doing, you're right. Probably nothing will happen. But if they change their orientation and at least a few Democrats are willing to support some reforms, then I think something probably will happen.

I think we may see a reckoning with the Republicans in the midterms. 2016, Republicans had everything and they did nothing. In fact, many of them supported the Russiagate investigation. Then 2018, the Democrats, you know, recoiling from Trump, take the House back. Then Trump loses 2020. Joe Biden is now president. And we end up with people who are sick and tired of watching this problem of social media manipulation, big tech censorship, actually having a major influence on the election, like we mentioned with suppressing negative news about Joe Biden's family. And now you have to wonder what's going to happen with the Republican Party. There's a lot of talk about a lot of, you know, right populists who are now

running to primary existing Republicans or, you know, current Republicans. I think, you know, a lot of people keep saying, oh, man, the Republicans are going to win the House in 2022 and they're going to push back. Maybe. But I also think we're going to see a lot of establishment Republican types, feckless, you know, laissez-faire, perhaps is the way you describe them. They do nothing, just whatever goes with these businesses. They're going to get ousted. I don't know for sure. I just think that the sentiment surely is there to not just have a sweep of the House, but also a changing of the guard in the Republican Party, because as it stands, we were mentioning this earlier in the show, Republicans don't do anything, you know, at least right now, right? They're not coming out and saying we want to repeal

firearms legislation. The left is saying we want firearms control. We want gun control. And the right's just saying, no, where, where is any semblance of a resistance saying we actually want to repeal some of that legislation doesn't exist. Then you have 2016 to eight, 2016 till today with every Trump supporter, knowing this was a problem going 2016 to 8, 2016 till today, with every Trump supporter knowing this is a problem going back to 2016, complaining about being banned, the censorship getting worse, and nothing getting done about it. Now all of these people are probably fed up. How stupid did Republican politicians have to be to ignore a problem that would result in them actually losing elections? So now you get Republicans just replacing those people.

Let me tell you a story. So, you know, not only did I work in journalism, I worked directly in advocacy earlier in life. And, you know, I was working for a progressive PAC in, I think it was around 2012, 2013, maybe a little bit after that. And I went to a progressive conference and there was a bunch of people in a room

from a range of progressive organizations. And they were all talking about protecting Social Security and Medicare. And I was like, guys, like you can talk about protecting it all day long or whatever. But you what you need to be doing is seizing the opportunity to talk about expanding these programs. Right. This was 2012, 2013. Nobody was talking about doing this. I think starting six or seven months later, there were members of Congress who started talking about doing it. There were other organizations started doing that. And I think the Democrats really came to understand something, that if you can control the playing field of the debate and not be on the defensive, you've shifted things in your direction, even if you don't exactly get what you want.

So now I think when someone like a Bernie Sanders talks about Medicare for all, it gets people excited about that. The chances of there being significant Medicare cuts, of raising the retirement age, of different types of privatization have gone down because now the public debate is all about whether we should expand it or not instead of cutting it. So I think exactly what you just said, the lack of a proactive Republican response on so many different issues allows the Democrats to control the playing field. And if I were the Republicans, I would think it was a terrible strategy. But I think that's just been their go-to mode for so long,

thinking that, you know, if we'll just call the Democrats socialists and communists and gun grabbers, that'll win us every election, right? And that's just not the reality in this country anymore. There are a lot of people who are interested in a lot of progressive ideas, as I think they should be, because I think some of the progressive ideas are worthwhile and worth exploring. But as long as there's no response, the progressives, of course, are going to win the day, right? You can't just completely fall back to your slogans

and your mottos from 40 years ago when the world has changed in 40 years. Here's the big difference I see, right? We have the squad, we have the progressive left, but man, do they fall in line really fast with the establishment Democrats. The Republicans hate the Republican Party. Like, I love pulling up these polls, but we go to civics

and you can take a look at their polling. It's like Democrat Party sentiment. And it's like, you know, 60% of people, I think they're viewed unfavorably, but like 40% view them favorably. Among Democrat voters, it's like 80% favor the Democratic Party. Among Republicans, favorability for the republican party it's like 50 something percent because like republicans don't like the republican party i think that right there from that polling shows that they're ready to to make a big movement right a big change that we're going to see a bunch of right populists primary a bunch of republicans and then change we'll see we'll see there's been a lot of talk about that. I think that the

energy is out there to do that. What is lacking is probably the organization. Something that's been really interesting, and again this was in my examiner article I reported, was that there are some Republican politicians now who are saying they will not take tech money. If a tech lobbyist or a PAC wants to throw them a fundraiser or give them money, they will not take it.

The Heritage Foundation, which is the most establishment voice on the right, recently said they will no longer take any more tech money. Now, does that mean that the Heritage Foundation is completely going with the populace against the establishment? I don't think so. Policy-wise, they haven't changed that much. But it does tell me that there's a sea change in thinking among their constituency and among the party about their relationship to corporate America

to where they actually said there's actually one corporate sector, at least, that they're not going to be taking money from anymore. That's a huge change from what the Heritage Foundation would have been saying 10 years ago. So I think there's a lot of this base sentiment on the Republican right that a lot of their politicians have not been standing up for their people, have not been standing up for their bases. It just needs to be organized, right?

A lot of what people like me on the left were doing years ago in terms of organizing and changing the way that the parties kind of address these issues and tackle them needs to happen on the right. And I think, honestly, a lot of the people who've been controlling the policy arena on the right are just very, you know, they're a very narrow band of people. A lot of them work for Ronald Reagan or in that administration, right? I think when a new generation of people takes over, they may be thinking a little bit differently. And I think you're starting to see that when you look at races like, you know, Joe Kent's out in Washington state where he's running a primary or a JD Vance running in Ohio.

You know, I think that these people see the Republican party's relationship to governance very differently. They think that the Republican party needs to be defending the interests of the base first and foremost, including by using state action if necessary, rather than adhering to a sense of, you know, needs to be defending the interests of the base first and foremost, including by using state action if necessary, rather than adhering to a sense of, you know, a sense of principles or certain tenets about limited rule of government,

irregardless of what's happening to the base of the constituencies of the voters. You know, why is it that, you know, Bernie Sanders folds so quick, though, right? And I mean, I don't mean him specifically. I just mean, like, you know, we look at 2016. You got Bernie and you got Trump, the insurgent candidates. Trump said, excuse me, no, kicks the door and says i refuse and takes over bernie says i'll say whatever you want hillary and then the the progressives come in and they're like yeah whatever the establishment wants well you know the funny thing is as as effectively as somebody like a hillary clinton red-baited

bernie sanders in 2016 campaign cycle and so on and so forth, I do think that Bernie is fundamentally a team player, right? Like he's someone who has certain policy priorities that he works for day and night, and he feels like if he can move the ball a little bit on them, he's willing to work with just about anyone. That's always been kind of the way that he's addressed his relationship to the Democratic Party, even though he's an independent. And I think it was highly predictable, given the way that he operated in congress in the 1990s i mean let's remember when newt gingrich was running congress the member of congress who passed the most amendments was

bernie sanders right bernie and newt are diametrically opposed from each other in many ways and of course the republicans were holding congress but bernie sanders was very very good at working with house republicans even and getting their votes on amendments where he felt like maybe they agree with him on some corporate welfare issues or some individual liberty issues. And I think that, you know, Bernie, you know, despite, you know, maybe he's not that great at telling this story about himself on the campaign trail, but I think within Congress, people realize that he's actually a really pragmatic figure. He's not really the revolutionary that I think he often, you know, was portrayed on

in his campaigns or some of his base or his really tough fans really think he is. Yeah, actually, I think it was the World Socialist website called Bernie Sanders a nationalist capitalist. And they were like, he's not a socialist. He does not support us. He's a nationalist who has foreclosed borders

and border barriers, and he is a capitalist who wants business to make money. He's just somewhat more left. That was funny. But here's the issue I take. You say these stories about Bernie Sanders. I'm like, yeah, well, that's why I liked him. Liked, past tense.

And then when he basically got on his knee and kissed Hillary Clinton's pinky ring, I'm like, this guy's got no principles. I don't care what he's fighting for. He could have absolutely said, I'm not going to endorse her. Sorry. Have a nice day. And that's it. But instead, he was like, whatever guy's got no principles. I don't care what he's fighting for. He could have absolutely said, I'm not going to endorse her. Sorry, have a nice day. And that's it. But instead, he was like, whatever the machine needs of me. And now what is he doing? I mean, this is a guy who in the 2016 cycles, in 2015, said that open borders is a Koch brothers proposal to, you know, to exploit these workers and things like that.

Then come, you know, 2020, the 2019 primaries and all that stuff, he's talking about open borders and free medical care for non-citizens and stuff. He totally flipped on all his positions. You know, that's what I see when I see, like, the squad. AOC, man, I remember as soon as she got elected, all of a sudden her stance on Palestine and Israel started shifting.

Activists started getting really angry, like, what's going on? Why is she walking this back? Because she didn't know what she was talking about right so they get in and they just say tell me where the line is and i will tell it look i think part of this is that you know we think about these members of congress as like what they're doing in congress with legislation and hearings briefings investigations so on and so forth but i think this newer breed of members of congress and there's people on the right who are this way as well i think they see a lot of and hearings, briefings, investigations, so on and so forth. But I think this newer breed of members of Congress, and there's people on the right who are this way as well,

I think they see a lot of their constituency the same way as an Instagram influencer or a celebrity sees their constituency, right? As long as they're making a lot of progress in terms of the retweets, the likes, the shares, the subscribers, they're raising a heck of a lot of money. I think AOC is one of the best fundraisers in Congress because of all her small donor base and her support.

I think they see themselves as achieving some level of success, right? And maybe they will even achieve long-term political success in their careers by doing it. But it isn't necessarily the most effective or the best way to move things in Congress. I mean, I'll give you an example. I think that Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, they get in a lot of hot water talking about Israel and the Middle East. But what exactly have they accomplished on those issues? Like, I can't think of them. They aren't any of the authors of any of the primary legislation on Middle East human rights issues.

That's Betty McCollum or some other members of Congress. When there was a recent outbreak of fighting between Israel and Gaza, it was John Ossoff, who was a very kind of low-key senator from Georgia who organized the letter calling for a ceasefire. It wasn't Ilhan Omar or Rashid Tlaib. Sometimes being the more outspoken, Twitter-punchy type person, maybe it'll get your applause, your fan base, and make you a little bit of a celebrity, but it isn't necessarily the way to actually move things in Congress and actually carve out some progress. And I think, yeah, to mean, to be fair to them,

I do think that they have sometimes unrealistic expectations put on them. I mean, they're freshman members of Collinger, so they're like, you know, some of them have been there for two terms now. Normally, when you're in that position, you're not going to be that effective just because of how the House operates. Now, the Senate's very different. You can be very effective as a first-term senator or very impactful, but the House is a little bit different.

So some of the expectations are maybe a little unfair on them. But also at the same time, you know, I think of them more as influencers and I think of them as lawmakers because that's mostly what they do. I think I will refer to this as the AOC phenomenon. How is it that she is such an effective fundraiser? The way I describe it is imagine you have a hundred cities and in those cities 47 you know 40 percent are republican 42 percent are democrat and then you've got a mix mishmash of libertarian and green party and unaffiliated whatever well i think those numbers are probably unfair because probably a lot it's like thirds is probably independent voters but the the point is, ignoring that, let's say that of each city,

1% is democratic socialist pro-AOC. Now, if you're in that city and you're trying to fundraise, you're not going to make any money because you're like, you know, you got one person who can donate to you. But what if you could tap into the power of the internet? And now you have every major city across the country, those in each in each and every city where there's just one person who believes that you believe all of a sudden now through the Internet, they're connected to you and funneling money to you. And now all of a sudden AOC is raising money outside of her district. And it's a new phenomenon. They talk about the squad members getting I think most of the donations came from outside

like the substantial amount, like 97 percent or whatever, came not from their own districts. So what they're doing is they're taking the fringe of each and every city. They're online, speaking up, sending money to AOC. AOC is not, I would say she's popular in the sense that all of those people are loud now. But if this was before the internet internet era she would not be considered popular i'd imagine right you'd have it's interesting because an equivalent figure if you go back to like the pre-social media era would maybe be like dennis kucinich right like kucinich was probably the most left-wing member of congress he was a democratic congressman from ohio he ran for

president a couple times and basically the bernie platform didn't really get anywhere um but it's exactly that like kucinich's power base was his actual district in cleveland in ohio or like in cleveland area ohio he wasn't tapping into a large sort of internet social media fan base that maybe represented a small sliver of america but could give him tons and tons of money the same way that i think really starting with ron paul Paul. Like Ron Paul on the right on the libertarian side, you know, representing sort of a minority faction of people, but he was able to mobilize a tremendous number of Internet donors, some of which transferred into volunteers, which increased his profile, which actually gave him a real platform and a voice in the political debates

and actually gave him some surprising performance in those couple of primaries that he ran in. I remember The Daily Show had a really fun segment about how, like, he got maybe second in a state and like the major media didn't even mention it but like you know he he obviously was doing very well punching well above his weight you know ron paul started that and i think bernie sanders continued it uh and now you have people who i think i would argue are much less impactful than someone like a bernie sanders which is the squad um who carved out their social media niches. And, yeah, I think they provide them with enough money to basically fend off any kind of challenger within their district,

which would only come from within their party because they're all very Democratic-leaning districts. But that simply isn't the way that you actually change things in Congress. The fulcrum of Congress is typically the swing districts, right? It's the districts that a party can't afford to lose. And the ones that give them the majority and the control of the committees and the chairs, but which are always very competitive. Because I don't think you can be AOC talking about prison abolition. I mean, that's the real thing she's talked about. And win any swing district anywhere in America.

That would be turned into an advertisement by the Republicans and you'd be gone in the next cycle. But you can sitting in a district that, I don't know if her district is like D plus 30 or 40 or something. D plus 30. Yeah, it's pretty up there. You can say basically anything you want, right? It'd be very hard for anyone to defeat her. Incumbents very rarely lose any kind of primary challenge,

and particularly in that kind of uplink of a district. I mean. Nancy Pelosi said you could take this glass of water, put a D on it, and it would win in AOCs or my district. They know it. How broken is the system, right? You know, we have talked with other GOP candidates in the past who are in like deep blue areas. And I'll tell you, man, the only reason areas are deep red or deep blue is because the parties don't invest money.

They're like, what's the point? And it's like, well, dude, if you're not trying to influence people on your ideas, you're losing. And I'll tell you, it's mostly a phenomenon of the right. We mentioned this before. They don't care about culture. They're sitting there thinking that appointing federal judges is winning the culture war. And it's like, no. Because I'll tell you this.

You can appoint however many judges you want, but if Amazon, CNN, cable TV, New York Times, all of these things are all saying X is right and Y is wrong, the courts are going to be like, I'll just do what they tell me because the courts ultimately in the end are just enforcing popular opinion. We've had a bunch of changes of precedent and and uh over our you know several hundred years free speech as we know it i think was only essentially not literally codified but precedent was set what like 1968 i think it was one example of this would be uh school prayer right like people today a lot of people you talk to them they're like well school prayer is not allowed because that's constitution the establishment clause blah blah school prayer was in schools until like the 1950s or something right the courts were defending it wasn't a matter of just like the constitution being rewritten it was just that the culture's perception of whether or not it's

appropriate changed right yep and that was much more important than having a particular judge on a particular court so as the right you know these establishment neocon republican types keep thinking that oh we're gonna just win in going to just win in the governmental policies. Meaningless. Meanwhile, the left is controlling all these institutions, taking them over. So it is a good point you bring up that someone like AOC couldn't win in a swing district. I do think there's something interesting to be said about the need for Republicans to go into an AOC-type district and actually start advocating and presenting an alternative. Well, let's remember that one of the – he's obviously in a very different role these days, but one of the icons of the Republican Party, Rudy Giuliani, was only that icon because he was able to win power in New York City.

Now, the Republicans do have a nominee in New york city curtis lee was a former you know garden angel he's actually a very storied figure in many ways but i you know i haven't looked it up but i doubt republicans are investing just about anything in that race yeah and you know i to be fair to them i doubt that they would win it no matter what they invested but it's a matter of of long-term investment right it's a matter of running a series of competitive candidates until you get someone like a rudy giuliani who's actually going to win who's going to pave the way for someone like a michael bloomberg who is you know semi-republican um but if you if you don't if you don't even try yeah obviously you're going to end up with that result i think this is what's contributing to

the culture war and the hyperpolarization in that republicans and democrats are like i have no reason to even talk to the people in these deep districts. And now that the hyperpolarization has gotten so extreme, now they're even more entrenched in not communicating. But if you just leave New York City to get further and further left without even trying, then we're drifting so far apart. Eventually the band snaps and then there's just two different realities.

I think we're already starting to see it. Like Portland announced they will cut off trade and travel or whatever for Texas. California banned state travel to like a handful of states. You're going to have this phenomenon that we talked about before where truckers aren't going to go to New York. They're going to be like, I can't go there because I don't feel like dealing with the, you know, the ban on public accommodations for people who aren't vaccinated.

Let's say you live in Texas and you're a truck driver and they're like, hey, we got a big shipment. It's got to be sent up to New York. Be like, nah, in Texas, they don't have the restrictions. In New York, they do. They're going to be like, I don't feel like, hey, we got a big shipment. It's got to be sent up to New York. I'd be like, nah. In Texas, they don't have the restrictions. In New York, they do. They're going to be like, I don't feel like doing it, which is going to be interesting because someone in New York who's a trucker

will be like, oh, I can go to Texas, no problem. So it's creating kind of a one-way track. Yeah. I mean, this is the important thing to understand about polarization. So I actually worked on polarization professionally from 2018 to 2020. I did a fellowship at a center at Berkeley

called the Greater Good Science Center, which works on psychology science. And so, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to researchers who study it and practitioners who work on it. Here's the thing to understand about it. It's not really based on what you believe, right? It's not, there is a really great political scientist

at the University of Maryland, Liliana Mason, who studied this. And what she found was that people who are most polarized from each other are people who have very strong political identities, who very strongly identify with the label like liberal or conservative. In fact, they are even more polarized from each other than people who disagree more on like an issue like guns or abortion or something, meaning you can be all the way to the left. But if you don't identify very strongly as a leftist or a liberal, it's not a core part of

your personal identity. You probably aren't going to be as angry or resentful or contemptuous of people who are all the way on the right, versus even if you're someone in the middle, but you're like very strongly identifying yourself as a Democrat, you conceive of yourself as that way, you can be much, much more polarized against someone, even someone who like agrees with you on most of the issues, but who has the opposite political identity. So I think it's really about making that political identity first and foremost, and then just not interacting very much with people with other identities because here's the reality. I grew up in the Deep South as a very left-leaning person,

particularly at that point I was very left-leaning compared to everyone around me. But, you know, all of my friends were Republicans. A lot of them hunted. You know, you go to Waffle House, you see someone with a Confederate flag T-shirt sitting next to someone with an MLK T-shirt. Like, that was the South growing up in the 1990s. There was so much mixing and integrating and like old-fashioned diversity of like you people would look at you funny if you were like yeah i don't want to have any friends who are

republicans they think you were some kind of freak or something right like but the facebookification of the united states where everyone has their kind of curtailed personality and very strong identity established through exclusively in some cases politics, has made it much easier for people to silo each other, to segregate from each other, and again, to elevate this part of your identity versus all other parts of your identity. You know, it's not your hobby, it ain't your career, it's not your religion, it's not your family life. It's, in this house, we believe X, Y, Z. You know, you see those signs around Northern Virginia. You know, you see, I don't know why they're putting those signs up.

Do I care what you believe? I don't really want to give someone a political litmus test upon meeting them, but that's what these people really conceive of themselves as. It's tribalism. And I'll tell you, I think it's, look, Republicans, I think, for the most part, are spineless, feckless, and aren't fighting for anything. I have very little to say about a party that's not doing much. They're not coming out and demanding the Department of Gun Services and a repealing of the NFA and a gun in the hand of every child.

You know, as much as I would jokingly be like, yeah, yeah, by all means, they're not doing that. The Democrats are absolutely steamrolling, pushing, advocating very, very hard for doing these things. And then when I call out the media for lying, what happens? I mean, look, look at Matt Taibbi. I'm sure you get it glenn greenwald gets it you're all right wing now you're all right wing grifters simply for saying hey media that wasn't true i think part of it is that when somebody has a very strong identity they view it as an identity threat to see someone disagree with them right and i think one way to resolve to be the other yeah exactly one way to resolve that threat is to simplify the world and just say, oh, that person's in the other in the other category. It's called what is it called? In group homogeneity, outgroup, outgroup homogeneity bias. Right. Where you think that everyone who disagrees with you basically has one set of narrow, narrow beliefs that all of which you hate and disagree with. Right. And so, yeah, it's I think it would be absurd if someone were to look at my resume and really honestly read my writing and think that you know i'm a staunch right winger or something they'll say it if i went down to my uh state house in virginia or something and told

them what i believe on criminal justice they'd probably think i was like a lunatic communist or something like you know but what if i go on twitter and i say something that like 60 percent of americans agree with you know people reply saying I'm Rudy Giuliani or I'm a fascist, blah, blah, blah. And it's just like, what are you talking about? It's like, it's an alternate reality, right? My favorite is the Satanic Temple. They're suing over the abortion bill in Texas.

And so I just tweeted, I was like, I want, okay, so one of the tenets of the Satanic Temple is that your body is inviolable. It is yours and no one can, you know, mess with it or whatever. And I'm like, all right, like, what's your thoughts on the New York vaccine mandate? Because I agree with you completely. And I'm pro-choice. I've always been pro-choice. I have wonderful arguments with pro-lifers and there's a sort of a libertarian impasse we come to.

And we go into great detail explaining this 50 billion times. I don't know if I can do it again. But when I post something like, you know, my body, my choice, I get these tribal leftists on Twitter who will say,, yeah, but when I come to Texas, you pro-life first. And I'm like, I'm not pro-life. And they're like, well, you're grifting them. And then I'm like, I'm grifting to whom? The left who is in favor of the vaccine mandates by me complaining about them or the right who's pro-life and me saying I'm pro-choice, which, who am I grifting to? You know, it's really funny. I think the people who tell you that, they always assume that you are captive to somebody else. They never assume that, like, let's say if someone who's very right-wing decided to have a conversation with you, that maybe you might convince them, right? Like, it actually does work both ways, but they assume it only goes one way.

Exactly. So something I've often said is politics flows in one direction. If there is a photo of me with a far- left Antifa guy, they'll accuse the Antifa guy of being right wing. Because it, but like me, like I'm fairly independent, centrist, moderate with some left leaning policy, some right leaning policies. But if I'm sitting next to someone on the right, they'll say, ah, that proves that Tim's far right. If I stand with someone on the left, I'm like, whoa, I didn't realize that Antifa guy was

actually far right. Because it only can go in one direction. There's no circumstance in which you take a right-wing individual, have him hang out and crack beers with leftists, and they claim the right-winger is a left-winger. Which is wild

because I think that, you know, a lot of the recent American history shows that, you know, it's called contact, intergroup contact or contact hypothesis, which is basically when people hang out with each other

You break down barriers Between each other So this is For the most part Been a huge win for the left Over the past 50 or 60 years Of American history Right

There's been much less Racial prejudice Much less religious And gender prejudice As a result of people Basically just mixing it up With each other Like that was

You can talk about All different ways Techniques Strategies To make this happen But ultimately It was people mixing up With each other

It was integrating, right? People just getting to know each other, being friends, has made America one of the most tolerant places on planet Earth. In human history, generally, it's worked out very well for left-wing goals, I would say. Absolutely. I agree. Let's go to Super Chats. If you haven't already, smash the Like button. Subscribe to the channel.

Share the show and become a member at TimCast.com because we're going to have a members- segment coming up after the show you'll you'll not want to miss them they're always so much fun because you swear a whole lot but uh you know what i'm going to do i saw a super chat which is more recent usually i go back to the beginning but we're going to read this one just because there's there's two points to be said jj says tim your argument against ivermectin because horses are large shows how little you have actually researched the subject. Please do some journalism and actually research the subject. JJ, you saying this shows how little you've actually watched my commentary on ivermectin

and other medicine because I've done a tremendous amount of research. In fact, I would argue more than many commentators. And my argument is not that there's something wrong with it because horses are large. Clearly, you have not heard the plethora of videos I've made about this. What I've been saying is, first, when it comes to – the first thing I'll say is, here's the challenge in doing these shows. If I break down – if I do a 15-minute segment explaining my entire thought process so you can understand a subject matter, people complain,

Tim, you talk about that too much. We get it. The issue is if I don't, I get super chats like this where they're like, you have no idea what you're talking about. So I can choose to do a 20 minute explainer on the morals and ethics of a particular issue in the news behind it. Or I can just be like, here's a quick summary moving on. But then people complain because they don't actually watch my videos. They hear one thing. So let me just break this down really, really quickly for you guys. People are ingesting

full tubes of horse paste, not in mass numbers, not shutting down hospitals. And there have been calls to poison center places about this. Don't do that. Don't take the horse paste. And I'll tell you why. It's not because horses are large. It's because humans have different quality product grading than animals do. And there's also issues like horses can tolerate certain substances, humans can't. Or dogs can't tolerate certain substances, humans can. I can't give you a full list of all of the chemicals and break down the formulation for you. That's why it's important you go to a doctor, ask them, and make sure that if you are prescribed any medication, you go to a pharmacist to get that actual medication. But I'll tell you, it's this simple.

The FDA says the formulation for animal-grade ivermectin contains things that have not been graded for humans. A horse liver may be able to process certain things that you can't. Did you know that cats can drink salt water? You can't. You will lose your mind, dehydrate yourself, and die. You wouldn't then be like, well, if the cat can drink it, I can drink it, even if it's in small amounts. No, it's not true. You're totally different. When the FDA approves something, they'll be like, okay, it can't have these things in it because humans don't react with it properly and they'll get sick. No, but horses, that won't bother them at all because they have a different digestive tract and a different liver and cows

have multiple stomachs. That's the issue. That's why don't eat horse paste in any amount and go to a doctor and find one who's knowledgeable about all this stuff and knows more than I do. And putting it simply, there are studies that are conflicted on ivermectin. Some say it's good. Some say it's not. There's data from countries saying it's good. There's some other information saying it's studies that are like, no, it's actually inconclusive and these studies are wrong or it's a spurious correlation. I can't tell you what is true because there's no definitive statement. There's competing narratives in a culture war. So the only thing I can say is you make the decision that's right for you.

Talk to someone you trust, professionals, when it comes to medical decisions. And that's the breakdown of that tweet. That being said, let's go back to the beginning and read some of these super chats. All right, let's go back to the beginning and read some of these super chats all right let's see billy stamatello says biden got heckled on his hurricane ida tour lol you love to see it shout out to the 201 sending love to the tri-state and the rest of the country hey thanks for the super chat oh this is great chameleon dx says tim big fan of yours but as someone who makes wine professionally watching your wine tasting over the weekend hurt my soul good that was the intention good so we we uh we

went for a labor day weekend we went to central west virginia look at these ghost towns it was awesome and we got these local berry wines so cool like blackberry raspberry blueberry and i have no idea what i'm doing so i just pretended to know what I was doing and then we like mixed all the wines together to make wine punch. I'm sure that was the most offensive thing we could have done. Oh my gosh. That's highly offensive.

I didn't even drink wine. I knew we would trigger some wine professionals. How was the punch? It tasted good. I don't know. Listen, okay. When you're in the middle of West Virginia, you're duct tape.

We're not talking about some fancy winery of people wearing fancy suits and tuxedos, sipping with their pinkies out. We're talking about taking a barrel and filling it with whatever you got, fermenting it and drinking what you got. Not really. I mean, it was actually really good wine. But I mix them together because we do what we want. All right, let's see what else we got.

3D Pyromaniac says, Yeah. Yeah. Pedro Henrique says, have you guys seen Jason Miller? Getter CEO was arrested today in Brazil for our independence. Bolsonaro was going through the same pressure Trump did. He was detained for questioning. Do you guys see this?

No. This is brutal. Did you hear about it? Yeah, I heard about it. I think Glenn was tweeting about it too. The craziest thing about it is Jason Miller, former senior advisor to Trump, he's about to leave. He's getting on his plane or he was about to get on his plane.

They detained him and questioned him for three hours. And your go-to figures on Twitter were cheering for it. And I'm like, yo, are we really at the point where one political – like people, citizens of this country are cheering for a foreign government detaining an American citizen who was leaving? That to me it's funny because i think that a lot of this started with like trump rallies and like lock her up and now i feel like lock her up is like a universal thing like there are always democrats hoping that a range of republicans like expelled from congress and or arrested which is a weird thing in a pluralist like democratic society for people to be asking for

or wanting. I mean, obviously, there are public officials who actually commit crimes and it happens every now and then, but this is all politically motivated. It's pretty obvious, right? I think it does not bode well for us. We had John Podesta, according to Boston Globe, was arguing for the West Coast to secede from the union in the event of a Trump victory. You've got states saying, we can't travel to these states anymore. You've got conflicting policies. Some states, you know, Oregon sued the federal government over when Trump was trying to stop the riots. Like the fracturing in this country is just getting absolutely worse. And I'll tell you, if there was a collapse happening, you wouldn't see it because you're in it. You know,

slow motion breakdown. You're standing in the middle of the forest, surrounded by trees, and you're like, what forest? Where? All I see is trees. And that's the issue right now. But I tell you, if I'm right, and I think we have absolutely been on this trajectory towards collapse or civil conflict or something, in 50 to 100 years, they'll be like, oh, this whole period was the breakdown of the American Empire

and all that stuff. All right. This sounds very weird, so I'm going to read it. Oh, good. Josh Oh My Gosh says, Hey, Ian, what if parallel universes are a mechanism for a higher dimensional womb using the accumulative experiences of every sentient living creature in every universe to make a baby that knows everything when born?

Mic drop. Yeah, I think we're in a black hole and that your thoughts are causing matter to come in from the outside of the black hole. So it looks like it's expanding, but matter is actually just coming in from the outside. I think you beat him. Might be onto something, Josh. Yeah. All right. Cat Purple says, journalism used to be a blue-collar job.

Then the elites took it over, and then it became a leap propaganda. Simple. Leap propaganda. Was it ever a blue then it became a leap propaganda. Simple. Leap propaganda. Was it ever a blue collar? Yeah, I think Tybee actually writes about this, which is that back in the day, it was sort of just like something if you were just kind of like, you know, you were kind of like second or third tier at your school or college, and you needed a job.

And because there were so many local newspapers back then, right, before there was so much consolidation. So a lot of people who entered journalism i think were kind of people who were not at the top of their business business or law school or they weren't cut out for medicine so on and so forth it wasn't really seen as an elite trade until very recently or something that was all that prestigious i guess um at least when you're talking about your run-of-the-mill journalist so i think there's a lot of truth to that although I don't know exactly like I don't have a figure or something of what the average journalist was like 50 years ago versus now but yeah it definitely the nature

and prestige of the trade has changed a lot well I have seen Anchorman and if it's anything like that it was bad yeah it's just like that I'm sure Kato Osta says Tim do you think fathers have any rights over unborn children? Like if you got your girlfriend pregnant, like if you got your girlfriend pregnant, didn't tell you and got an abortion, would you be upset? If society make men responsible for impregnation, it would only be fair they get some rights. It's very interesting. And I think the answer is yes. I don't think it's equal. I will also add that, you know, we were talking on the show last week and people were saying that the Texas abortion law has exemptions for rape and incest. It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't. And I've read a couple

different articles saying there is no exemption. In that case, that law is a bad, bad, bad, bad law. It is tough, though. It is still very difficult to parse this out morally, though. There is a medical exemption, but no exemption for rape. And that tends to be the main focal point of the argument I'm seeing from any on the left that are advocating for the right at any point to abortion, specifically rape.

And I'm like, yeah, the state's saying that somebody was forced by someone else, and then that person is the one who took the action to impregnate the woman. The woman didn't choose to do that. Then the argument from people in the chat was that, you know, if the woman makes a choice, she has a responsibility to the life inside of her.

But what if she didn't make that choice? Taxes should have an exemption in that regard. It's not easy. This is probably one of the most morally and ethically difficult questions of our lives, I'll be honest. All right, let's see what we got here. Delta 34 says, Hey Tim and cast, I worked a few years on a

project to find a universal formula for morality. I have it almost fully animated and narrated. What does an enlightenment defender got to do to come on and share it? Are you checking the spin the UFO stuff? Spintheufo at gmail.com. Yeah, you're welcome to resend it. It might have slipped through the cracks,

but I do check. Yep. There you go. Matthew Hunter says, The horse paste tubes are meant to be dosed by weight, and it's the same dose per pound for humans as for horses. Don't take 1,250 pounds worth of IVM unless you weigh that much regardless. Simple? No, not simple, as I've explained.

Look, some people are arguing, but I think the issue is, are you really going to trust that they're going to keep a product safe when the liability is substantially lower? There's another issue with horse medication versus human medication. It may be ivermectin as the active ingredient. It doesn't mean the inactive ingredients are the same. I think the ivermectin paste is like 90, what is it, 98% not ivermectin. There's other active ingredients in it.

That sounds right. If a human being ingests something and dies, the liability for that company could be in the tens of millions. If a horse ingests something and dies, depending on the horse, the liability could be in the tens of thousands. So I'll just put it this way. Just talk to a doctor, man. Don't go to a tractor supply because it's just,

I hear these stories about, you know, we've heard a lot of stories about people going on Amazon and going on these other websites and buying, you know, prescription drugs, but off prescription by going to other companies, countries and stuff like that. I think that's all bad too. I think, you know, but you know what? Look, I'll i'll tell you this my opinion my choice for my life your opinion your choice for your life all right let's see we got michael martin says fauci and ran paul more proof that more proof that the difference between conspiracy theories and the truth is about 60 to 90 days thank you for being my nightly news hey thanks for for watching we try our best what is natalie cuchia says hey tim and crew just wanted to hear you say rachel mad cow out loud please feel free to go around the table and have everyone say it well i'll read it but

people don't have i love it no no all right let's see daniel bundrick says tim please get you a correction ibuprofen is toxic to dogs i have your reference here dunier e ibuprofen toxicity in dogs cats and ferrets vet med um we just google search ibuprofen for dogs and there's like dog branded ibuprofen so i don't know whatever uh perhaps you can't give too much of it to them but the joke i was making is that they prescribe the same antibiotics and the same like painkillers to pets and so what are we going to do we're going to go around being like joe biden was seen ingesting dog medicine today at the white house and it's like he's holding a bottle of aspirin it's like dude it's aspirin it's it's it's for what it's for you know what i mean

all right let's see where we're at. Ethan Davis, Tim, I think I might have an answer or part of the answer to your question about what happened to people, the rage. And I think it stems back to the birth of the internet and the death of innocence. So one of the things we've pointed out frequently is how people have become extremely angry. You know, people I've known my whole life all of a sudden are just messaging me saying extremely angry, vile things.

And I'm just like, yo, why are you so mad? Like there are people I've known for decades. We're friends on Facebook. And all of a sudden they'll message me with all caps being like, I'm sick of this. Yeah, the facts. And I'm like, why are you yelling at me? And they're just like, they have no real answer.

It's like, where did this anger and rage come from that people are just so angry all the time now? Yeah, I mean, I think part of that is they've externalized their mental state or their problems, right? I mean, maybe something is happening in their personal lives or they have some lack of personal fulfillment. And they've taken that and turned it into a political problem, right? If this wasn't happening in the world, if this happening in society in politics i'd be happier right and that's when they they personalize those problems i i do marvel at like you know i know people who are like war refugees who came to united states who were very chill and relaxed and very happy about living here and then i know people who grew up here upper middle class who seem like you know

enraged and upset all the time it's just like it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense if you think about their external life circumstances right but it makes a lot of sense if you think about this as a failure for them to like establish like an internal locus of control and actually recognize their personal problems as personal problems and like it doesn't mean you shouldn't care about the world or engage with it but like if you find yourself being personally enraged and being anti-social towards your friends or your colleagues, then there is something that you need to work on personally before you fix the rest of the world. Yeah. You know, I think there's a couple things at play. People have no purpose in their lives.

When we were in West Virginia, they had this thing called hotspots. They're basically just like miniature casinos. So we were bored. It's late. Now I'm like, I don't want to sit in Sunday night or whatever on Labor Day. Let's go to these little hot spots. We drove like 10 miles. We go to this place, and it's a little hole in the wall lounge.

They've got, I think, seven slot machines. And each machine has like a different – you can play games. They're all full. There were like two machines open, so we played. I ended up winning a ton of money. It was awesome. I turned $60 into 400 but the point is people who are there just gambling and i'm like that's kind of sad like that's your that's that's that's that and they're all over the place after we left that hot spot we

went to another one same thing you know seven or eight slot machines people just sitting around gambling and i'm just like they have no purpose. There's nothing to do. Their work is done. They're sitting at home. They're bored. They want to go out. So they just go to the slot machine and start pulling the lever. And I think that occupies them. That keeps them relatively sane. It's like, I'm going to go do my thing, my routine. But there's a lot of people in cities who don't have that. So now they're home from work. They have their bills paid. They have no purpose. they find black lives matter they find antifa they get angry the the hole in their hearts that they feel is externalized and then you add covet on top of that people are locked in their

apartments and now what do they say it's the it's the unvaccinated fault it's your fault it's trump's fault it's not my fault it's your fault. There was a there's a documentary filmmaker, Dia Khan, and she's made documentaries about both white nationalists and Islamists. And she got to know them very well, actually. And I think she was on Sam Harris's show or something. And she actually explained some of her thoughts on making the documentaries. And she's I think she noticed that there were a lot of similarities between the two sides. A lot of people would think, no, those people are diametrically opposed or different politically religiously so on and so forth um but she basically found that they were young alienated people who needed some purpose in their lives and this is what filled it i mean these people could have easily become like guitar players or bowling enthusiasts or you know any any

number of things they could have filled the hole with something healthier um but this just happens to be the door they picked and it led them to a very unhealthy place and i think that they sincerely believed that if they had won whatever political struggle they were involved in their sectarian struggle that they would be happier people uh but it was the same it was the same mistake both sides were making in this equation from the extremists that she had covered and of course most people were talking about in these cases they're not actual extremists and they're not violent or breaking the law or anything but it's a miniature version of the same problem right i think that's probably where a lot of it comes from because under trump things are pretty good maybe one of the components is that with 2019 being so good you know i i heard from so many people about how

they made so much money and then 2020 was just so awful and you know what maybe maybe people starting to realize that this year with everything that's getting bad, a lot of the anger is coming from their decision to vote for Joe Biden. I mean, look at Sam Harris saying he's eating his words. So they go through this very, you know, they go through 2020. They blame Trump for everything. It's your fault. Everything was so good. It's your fault. Now it's 2021 and Biden's in charge and it's still bad. And now there may be a lot of them are maybe having this cognitive dissonance of maybe it was the pandemic and maybe voting for Biden is not going to change anything. And they're just there's no way to solve it. So they blame everyone else.

All right. JDA says the journalistic exodus to Substack is not the only one. In the past few months, the top writers for DC and Marvel have moved to Substack. Also, what remains at DC Marvel is Marvel have moved to Substack also. What remains at DC Marvel is the worst of the woke. Wow. You know we saw Shang-Chi?

How was it? I liked it. You didn't like it? I thought it was okay. It was okay. I give it a C. I could have fixed it. They picked a lot of good Chinese or Hong Kong scene actors to be part of it who really kind of stole the show even though they were side characters.

I think that was a pretty good decision on their part to pick those people. I think the challenge was that they were trying to make – they should have gone all in on China in my opinion. Instead, they tried adding some American stuff to it so Americans could relate to it, I guess. Nah, it should have just been in China. So I'm not going to spoil anything, but Shang-Chi is from China,

but he lives in America and then goes to China. And I'm just like, that just made the whole thing confusing. There are a lot of missing beats. Well, what's interesting is like the larger context of it is Disney's trying to expand heavily in the Chinese market as is much of Hollywood. So I think the more they can set in China,

the easier it will be for them because I think a lot of the Chinese audience isn't as interested in some of the American stuff. So I think they were trying to split the difference and get both audiences involved. To be fair, I wasn't, right? So like, look, we've got a bunch of marvel movies that are really really good if you're going to make a marvel movie about

the mandarin with his 10 rings and he's chinese and he has chinese children you don't need to put him in san francisco for 10 minutes like it just made the story not make sense and there were a bunch of things they could have done i already figured out how to fix the entire movie because i did it with dr strange the what if episode but i i i'm like man i wish there were so many missed beats but but it was good it was it was um i would say i give it a grade c meaning uh i enjoyed going out and watching it um had fun you know hanging out in the theater. It was enjoyable. And what's the actor's name?

Simu? Simu? I don't know. I don't remember. I don't know. He was really good. He was really, really good. And the guy who plays that, I thought they both did a really, really great... I think everybody did a great job.

But I'll tell you this. I can always tell you my ultimate rating is not a thumb up or a thumbs down. It's would I watch the movie again? And I would say for the movie Doctor Strange from 2016, I watched that movie on loop. I love that movie so much. Shang-Chi, you know, honestly, at first I would have said no. I'd watch it again. I wouldn't go to the theaters.

When it comes out, I'll probably put it on and watch it again. But not particularly strong, you know. So it's like, yeah probably put it on and watch it again but not particularly strong you know so it's like yeah enjoyed it you know i think the ending was fun but uh they could have done a way better job i think a lot of it was it wasn't explained as as like what was happening wasn't explained well enough yeah they didn't give the main character as much characterization in this one for sure yeah it was it really felt like it was a bunch of scenes that were edited together that was my issue with it and i'm like they needed only a little bit to make it like totally epic and oh man i don't want to spoil anything so i won't say much but they needed only a few sentences

and a few tweaks in like one or two places and it would have been like one of the greatest films ever so that says a lot it was it was it was, it was, I like it. It was good, but you know, I'm not going to give it a, a, unfortunately, but I was excited for it. It's good to see. All right, let's see what we got here. Insert name here says, Tim, when are you going to have Colean Noir or another prominent to a voice on?

Also, I know it's not your focus, but you rarely talk about anti 2A stuff. We talk about gun control periodically. We had the fellow from Phoenix Ammunition on. Recoil. We've had the guys from Recoil, yeah. Or the guy from Recoil Forest. We are staunchly

pro 2A to an extreme degree. When we had Colonel Allen West here, and he was saying that like if you commit a felony you lose your right to have a gun and i was like i disagree i think once you get out of prison you get your gun back and he was like i don't know about that violent criminals and i'm like yep i think so i think if you get out of prison you get your gun you get your vote you get everything back that's how it works you outflank the texas republican well people were like tim rights can be taken from you through due process. And I'm like, a life sentence, never owning a firearm to defend yourself after you got out of prison?

I think that's a little much. Now, like, okay, for sure, like you're a murderer or something with 25 to life, and after 30 years they let you out. We can have a discussion about some kind of, like, extended due process of restrictions. I still lean towards you get out of prison, you get your vote, you get your gun back. That's just me. All right, let's see. Deliopolis says, the argument governments shouldn't legislate morality doesn't hold water when it's obvious that the left has no problem legislating immorality. That's one of the big challenges, I suppose, is that when it comes to any kind of culture war issue,

you have people who are like, I'm going to play by the rules, be nice, and tell the truth, and the other side saying we're going to lie, cheat, and steal. Who's likely to win in that conflict? If you're playing a game against somebody and they're willing to lie, cheat, and steal, you're at a serious disadvantage. It's tough. All right, let's see. Wicked Karma 1776 says I'm completely wrong about ivermectin, saying look at ivermectin

meta study, peer-reviewed, 63 studies, 21,000 patients. So I did, and we talked to Dr. Chris Martinson about that, and the issue was, there's a bunch of reports from like universities and medical journals saying that, you know, a lot of those studies were done wrong. The methodology was bad. And so all I'm saying is this. I'm not going to trust someone simply because someone else says, like, I know person A is lying. It doesn't mean person B is telling the truth. So my ultimate position is the media is lying about it across the board with the horse paste thing.

The media is lying about Joe Rogan, and they're putting out these headlines to manipulate you. I can't tell you about efficacy because there's conflicting studies, even with this one big meta-analysis. There's a bunch of researchers saying that's not correct. So I'm going to leave it to you guys to go talk to a doctor, make sure there's someone you trust. And look, man, there are people in the culture war, I don't care which side they're on, who are going to believe things and tell you things.

And you're going to have to navigate this world. But ultimately, I try to be careful of people who are trying to win some kind of cultural issue when it comes to my personal health decisions. By all means, I think the right tends to be more publishing the truth in media, not always, and the left tends to be publishing lies and manipulations, the establishment left. That doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly trust anybody, and if I don't have definitive data in front of me, even if I want to believe something, I'm not going to make a move on it. Sorry. It's up to you to talk to somebody who's got the expertise and everything. And by all means, tell me I'm wrong.

That's fine. Tell me you trust Brett Weinstein because he's the evolutionary biologist. Way more credentialed than I am. My position is my position because I'm not in a position to have any expertise on this stuff. It's the best I can do, my friends. Oh, okay. So here we go. So i've got some pushback on the uh abortion thing zachariah kitzman says tim you're wrong about the abortion law not having

exemptions it's already written into texas law the heartbeat bills uh in addition to the newly standing law i'll have to do a deep dive on this one because there's been a i think the governor was asked about this and this week or this past week and he said something like well you have six weeks so six weeks takes account you know that the time someone would need in that emergency situation is that you could but i don't think it has an explicit exemption right and then he also didn't he say something like well we're gonna hunt down all the rapists to stop this yeah that was also kind of a weird something like it takes you i don't see how that would really really take care of the issue but yeah yeah yeah so um you know but uh i'll do a deep dive to make sure but i i i saw

that because we had said on the show we had people on the show saying there is an exemption for this it's cleverly crafted and i was like oh okay all right well that makes sense and then um i saw some advocacy groups saying there's there's no no exemption for rape or incest. And so I said, okay, I better fact check this one. I pulled up a handful of articles saying there is no exemption. And I was like, oh, okay, well, I guess I was wrong about that. But I could be wrong about being wrong about that. So I'll just actually dig into the law and pull it up,

as I should have done in the first place. Well, there you go. All right, let's see. Oh, someone mentions that there is uh the day after pill that victims can take oh yeah uh someone is asking me for joe rogan's phone number this is the weirdest thing when people like i get we get a lot of people who come through here email and they'll be like yeah oh and by the way can you uh call joe for me and i'm like no i can't what are you that's that's bro you know a funny story though once i was at a boost mobile this is like 15 years ago oh man this is like 16 years no it's

like 15 years ago and uh the guy who worked there had robin williams's phone number because i guess he looked it up because they had the computers and i heard him talking to his co-worker about how he had it and i was like bs you don't haveworker about how he had it, and I was like, BS, you don't have his phone number. He's like, yeah, I do, and I was like, prove it, and he's like, I'm not going to give you his phone number, and I was like, you don't got it, and then he holds it up for about a second and then pulls it away, and then I was just like, 867-5309, and he was like, oh, dude, dude, dude, please, please, please. Like, he didn't realize how he just photographic memory and know the number, but that was funny. I don't know if it was actually his number, though. It was probably just someing at the shop but i don't i don't know

why i told that story all right let's see sunny james says with all these mainstream media resignations are they taking early retirement to save face as the left gets more centralized the joy behar type or maddo type operations get too expensive and less needed how many people you need to say the same thing i mean yeah well rachel maddow is giving like 30 million for like a network now or something yeah she's kind of grandfathered in though i think she's been at this for a while and it's kind of given her a level of security because they have an audience who wants that every night but it's true that the the younger cohorts millennials and zoomers are probably not going to want or need that format.

Oh, yeah. So people like to point out that the key demo ratings are abysmal for CNN and MSNBC. I mean, it's true. Our ratings are higher in the key demo than CNN, MSNBC, HLN, whatever. But their total viewership, because they have people who are over 55, brings them up to the hundreds of thousands, close to a million. That being said, on YouTube, we can brag all day and night, but there's probably a thousand channels

that are in the same category of beating Rachel Maddow's ratings. So it's not to say that we're doing that well. We're like, probably. I mean, actually the TimCast IRL is apparently a top iTunes podcast now, consistently, which is great news. When I was doing Tim Pool Daily Show every single day, I reached like number 17, like total podcast. And then when I stopped doing weekends, it just knocks you off because that's how it works or whatever.

But whatever. It is what it is. We can brag about how they're doing really bad, but the reality is they're still doing really, really well on YouTube. So we got to be, we got to recognize that for what that means for the future. But that being said, my friends, thank you all so much for hanging out. Go to timcast.com, become a member.

We're going to have a members only segment coming up. We're going to be talking about the ACLU flip-flopping and the corruption of mainstream institutions and how it took place, why it took place. So you'll definitely want to see that. Smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, share the show with your friends, leave us a good review.

You can follow us at TimCastIRL. You can follow me personally at TimCast. Zed, you want to shout anything out? Just basically, yeah, check out our sub stack at inquiremore.com. For $6 a month, we hope to give you guys a lot of good content, a lot of good original reporting and news analysis that you won't get elsewhere. And where can people follow you on Twitter? Yeah, so my Twitter is just my first name and last name. So Z-A-I-D-J-I-L-A-N-I. So where can people follow you on Twitter? Yeah. So my Twitter, just my first name, last name was Z A I D J I L A N I. So thanks man.

Um, you can follow me, Ian crossland.net. Hit me up on social medias at Ian crossland. Good to see him. And it occurred to me that you guys might not know what email Tim's referring to. And this is just spin the UFO at gmail.com.

So if you want to send something my direction, I will read it. I probably won't respond to it because I do get a lot. I get a lot of email in general anyway. But I am always sifting through it. And you guys are welcome to follow me on Twitter at Sarah Patch Lutz. We will see all of you at TimCast.com. The member segment goes up usually around 11 or so p.m.

So check it out, and we'll see you all there. Bye, guys.